Daniel Holtzclaw has been found guilty and is going to be in jail for a long, long time. He wept when the verdict was announced because, as a coward and a bully, his crimes have finally caught up with him.
He was a bad cop who used his authority to prey on women who had no recourse to justice.
By allegedly focusing on poor black women with criminal records, Holtzclaw kept himself from being caught—until he met J.L., a black woman who was just passing through the neighborhood he patrolled. “Not only is this individual stopping women who fit a profile of members of our society who are confronted rightly or wrongly by police officers all the time,” said the [Oklahoma County] prosecutor, [Gayland] Gieger. “He identifies a vulnerable society that without exception except one have an attitude for ‘What good is it gonna do? He’s a police officer. Who’s going to believe me?’”
Are there any good cops left? And what is wrong with our society? It’s sick that we have a whole segment, entire neighborhoods, where we assume that the poor residents are so deserving of mistreatment that we police them with predators who feel contempt and hatred for the people they are supposed to protect and serve.
And this disgusts me.
During the trial, defense attorneys tried to challenge the victims’ credibility by emphasizing their criminal records to the jury and asking about their past drug use. Holtzclaw’s family also accused the victims of fabricating their stories.
So if the police harass and abuse a neighborhood for years, that becomes an argument that the police can’t be harassing and abusing the people there because they’re all criminals? There’s a cycle of state-sanctioned toxicity that has to be stopped.
But for now, it’s good to see Holtzclaw shaking and sobbing. I think of all the girls and women who were shaking and sobbing and despairing of justice after he attacked them, and see maybe a tiny bit of justice trickling back.
What makes me cringe about these stories is how easily they lend themselves to the “few bad apples” narrative. See? We arrested this bad cop! This proves that police police police! Don’t blame us for the bad actions of a few! We can be trusted!
You’ve asked the right question: are there any good cops left? And you’ve also noted the key point here: police target people with records, no money, and no voice. The perfect victims.
I’ve worked in law enforcement and served warrants. It wasn’t lost on me that I was constantly visiting the same few “hot spots” in town, and that they were areas with a low-income, transient population. Lots of rental properties. And I’ve noticed that, for example, I can knock on a door and say, “I’m afraid I have a warrant for your arrest, ma’am,” and they will grab their handbag and come with. I could be a serial killer in a halloween costume. People generally, but especially poor and marginalized people, are conditioned to obey authority. They are accustomed to their own powerlessness. If they push back, it’s often with desperation: “I would do anything not to be hauled to jail right now!”
The ones with money immediately pay their fine (in which case I’m authorized to release them), or call a lawyer to meet them at the courthouse, or in one notable case call the judge and hand me the phone.
Factor in that police are self-selected for a desire (or at least willingness) to use force on others, and you have a disproportionate number of bullies who will take advantage of this situation. My own municipality–a tiny little town with a part-time police force of only a handful of cops–has had recurring reports of cops taking two hours to get a woman to the jail from where they arrested her, and such like. The system gives enormous power to cops, and systematically strips marginalized people of the means or even the will to resist. Anyone with a criminal bent and half a brain can hear opportunity knocking.
The rest of the cops turn a blind eye mostly in a case of the banality of evil: work becomes an awkward place if you have to arrest your coworkers or worry about being arrested by them. Not to mention other factors like feeling above the law, etc.
Disclaimer: I always coyly say “I work in law enforcement,” because it would endanger my pseudonymity to be too explicit. I’m not a cop, but as noted I do (have) arrest(ed) people. There are not that many jurisdictions in the US where such a situation exists. But I need to point out that I’m not associated in any way with the police in my municipality.
So the defense attorney and the perpetrator’s family basically argued the victim’s case for them? That was… nice(?) of them.
Out on parole in a couple of years is my guess.
It is good to see a cop actually see trial for anything, an actual conviction is kind of amazing. I wonder if this will put even a slight dent in those that try to claim cops are above reproach?
Quibble time:
ffs…
No one who wants to be a cop should be allowed to be one.
The conviction means that there is hope of justice. However, what struck me was the fact that the jury was all white in a city that is about 60% white. How is this jury representing the community as a whole? Appears to be another sign of rot within the system of American justice even if justice was found in this case.
Good. I wish this meant more though. I’m glad Holtzclaw was convicted, but the majority of cops who rape and sexually assault aren’t convicted, and most don’t even lose their jobs.
http://www.alternet.org/when-cops-rape-and-nothing-happens
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cops+who+rape&t=i&ia=news
At least they were arguing that they were liars rather than that they deserved it or that it wasn’t a crime because of who they were, which is only infinitesimaly, marginally kind of less disgusting…sort of…
How fucking tragic is it that seeing some justice being done feels like an unusual accomplishement?
One down, how many more to go? Way too fucking many.
cops, when convicted of being a criminal (Bench W), still are not too welcomed [euphemism] by the inmates.
I’ll pray for him (for all the good that’ll do /snark).
Too bad too many cops see themselves as the arbiters of justice, and go beyond their assigned role, into that of judge, jury, (ummm) punish-er. The people he catches, are _suspects_, better to let the trial determine the guilt value.
Justice is best served by showing respect for the civilians, not authoritarianism.
Every cop I’ve known was a bully and a thug (and in one case a child rapist who is serving 15 years). I want this narrative of a few bad apples to blow away like the chaff it is.
Dreaming @ 9:
That’s exactly what they were arguing. FFS.
CaitieCat @ 10:
Yep. Excerpts from http://bigstory.ap.org/article/fd1d4d05e561462a85abe50e7eaed4ec/ap-hundreds-officers-lose-licenses-over-sex-misconduct
Ok, i don’t want to make a lot of it since obviously i failed in my attempt at showing contempt and disgust for this arsehole’s defense, but denying that anything happened and that the victims were making it up is not the same as claiming that what happened is not a crime because of who the victims are. Minor point, but it shows two different, although both disgusting, ways of claiming there was no crime.
And just to be clear, i do think both are wrong and disgusting, but personally, the reason why i feel that claiming that the events don’t constitute a crime because of who the victim is is that little bit worse because of how fucking dehumanizing it is. Not that it makes a difference to the fact that both are ways to dismiss the victim…
PZ, as a former Eugenius, you know what the town is like. Are you familiar with the Magana & Lara case a while back? Same shit, different day. Their reign of terror went on for six years, with many, many complaints that were ignored or swept under the rug. Many of the cops that actively covered for them are still on the force today, with promotions & raises.
http://www.eugeneweekly.com/2007/03/29/coverstory.html
@caine:
I’m glad Holtzclaw was convicted, but the majority of cops who rape and sexually assault aren’t convicted, and most don’t even lose their jobs.
Of course. We have cops shooting random people on camera and they still get paid vacation time while their superiors wait to see if any major protests erupt. If not, back to business as usual.
Between the “Deja vu” post with the many horrific accounts posted there and this, i’m accumulating a nice layer of despair reserves for the holidays…
Nothing is going to change unless and until the entire culture of policing is changed. You can’t root out the bad cops because as we see all too often, any attack on one cop is seen as an attack on all of them and they close ranks and subvert any attempt to prosecute, fire, or even discipline the wrongdoers.
Even if only a minority of cops are bad seeds, anyone who covers up for them, or merely goes along with the cover up because it’s “what you do” to help out a brother in arms, are equally culpable. People are losing their lives and livelihoods because of it.
Fundamentally, though, this is a political problem and needs a political solution. Change will only happen if the right people are appointed / elected into positions where they can reform the criminal justice system from top to bottom into something that will make us all feel more secure. Sadly, i don’t see much hope of that happening.
I despair sometimes. A comment thread on the recent news story that mentally ill people are 16 times more likely to be killed by police than normal people was filled with comments basically saying “Well, what can you do if they won’t/can’t obey their commands?”
Tell that to the thousands of unarmed British cops who have to deal with mentally ill people, many of them dangerous, on a daily basis and yet managed to handle them without shooting any of them, let alone killing them.
Far too many Americans believe that cops have the right to shoot people at the slightest threat against them, and it only goes to reinforce the same beliefs in the cops themselves, which only leads to more unjustifiable shootings. Again, nothing is going to change until the culture changes, and that will take some strong and brave political leadership from many leaders around the country from the President down, but I just don’t see how that happens.
I’ve gotten old. My students used to be suspicious of the police; now, almost invariably, they parrot the “blue lives matter” line.
I just hope they won’t vote for Trump when it comes down to it.
Cuttlefish @ 22:
Is that what the students of colour say too?
This is what it looks like when the chickens come home to roost.
There is disgusting endemic abuse endured by the marginalised (esp sex workers) at the the hands of police. This has been documented by a number of studies and as a fact it is uncontroversial.
Hope springs eternal. I take some limited solace that a black woman’s police report was taken seriously by the white establishment, a detailed investigation took place, an arrest was made and a conviction achieved despite a racially stacked all white jury.
I have no reason to believe, and a hundred reasons to dismiss this as a positive model for how to address specific incidents of abuse. But as an outcome I do appreciate this flower in a field of desolation.
@tacitus
“I despair sometimes. A comment thread on the recent news story that mentally ill people are 16 times more likely to be killed by police than normal people was filled with comments basically saying “Well, what can you do if they won’t/can’t obey their commands?””
The problem is that the logic of ‘I had to shoot them, they did not instantly obey my commands’ is used not just when we have someone waving around a weapon but when someone posing no threat simply doesn’t obey the police instantly. Apparently US cops are too stupid to think that a person might be mentally ill, elderly, cognitively impaired or hearing impaired. Its that the cops are bullies and thugs who can’t stand anyone who doesn’t immediately stoke their egos.
And on ‘blue lives matter.’ I thought cops deserved respect because they willingly took on a job where they could get killed? Instead, we’ve got cops that would prefer to deal damage rather than face a tiny risk.
“Are there any good cops left?” Wow, talk about hyperinflated rhetoric. You’re awfully quick to leave scorched earth when Islamic terrorists are held up as being representative of Islam as a whole (which they certainly aren’t) and yet you froth at the mouth at every incident involving a bad cop (again, certainly in the vanishing minority of officers.) If all cops were as bad as you seem to think they are, this country would be in flames, the same flames that you rightly point out we would be experiencing if every Muslim was a terrorist. Should cops be held to a higher standard, since they are entrusted with our safety and protection? Of course they should. But Jesus Fictional Christ, you come off very poorly with this overblown rhetorical lather that paints all cops as psychopaths.
supergeek123 apparently hasn’t had very many interactions with police officers OR is white and male.
There are a lot of bad cops. There are even more indifferent cops, or in-group cops that allow the bad cops to get away with awful things like rape, racial profiling, and murder. The few ‘good cops’ who actually report the crimes committed by their fellows often lose their jobs.
Most places don’t require police precincts to keep track of sexual misconduct by their officers, for example. Of the few places that do, in a 6 year period 1,000 officers lost their badge for things like rape, sexual assault, etc. Not prosecuted. Not jailed. Just simply lost their badge and ability to be a cop.
I’m waiting for Penny L to show up in the comments to tell us how every victim needs to report to the police.
*grabs popcorn*
Citation fucking needed. Are you a good cop if you look the other way? Are you a good cop if you lie to protect your fellow officers? Not all of them are perpetuating violent crimes but but if there were a “vanishing minority” of bad cops this shit wouldn’t be going on all the time.
http://vividmethod.com/transcript-the-standard-you-walk-past-is-the-standard-you-accept/
Carlie @29:
So… who reported him to the police?
(Was it a victim?)
Munch, munch.
The 50/50 split on guilty and not guilty verdicts is interesting, and I’m really curious about what led the jury to decide that half the counts had not been proven. In particular, since I know that there were GPS data that corroborated the accounts of some of the victims, I would be curious to know whether the charges that were corroborated by those data – as opposed to charges that were supported solely by victim testimony – were the ones that resulted in guilty verdicts. It would be an interesting (and perhaps disheartening) indicator of whether the jury did, in fact, agree with the defense arguments that the victims had a credibility problem.
To be clear, this is just something I’m wondering about, and it’s entirely possible that I’m off-base. There are a lot a reasons that a jury could find that an element of a crime was not sufficiently proven, and the GPS data could have little or nothing to do with the outcome here.
I’ve had trouble finding an analysis of the case that gets into the evidentiary aspect of the case as it relates to the breakdown of the verdicts. If anyone sees one, would you post it here?
@HappyNat
There may be close to 1,000,000 cops in this country. If .01% of them are bad (what I would call a vanishing minority) that’s about 10,000 chances for something to seem like it’s going on all the time. But please, feel free to substitute whatever percentage serves your narrative.
@supergeek123
So numbers retrieved from your rectum? Not so super.
@tacitus #20
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: A very effective step would be the creation of an agency like Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit.
Around here, when a cop shoots someone it isn’t a cop that investigates it.
Around here, when a cop rapes someone it isn’t a cop that investigates it.
Heck, the police don’t even get to investigate it when someone sees a RIDE checkpoint, flees down a side street and gets into an accident.
The SIU is why police officer James Forcillo is before a jury on charges of murder and attempted murder for his shooting of Sammy Yatim, (the attempt charge is for the second volley of shots after the lethal shot had been fired and Sammy Yatim was down).
I can pull numbers from my butt too.
There are actuality about 2 million full and part time officers. From the miniscule number of departments that keep records, 1,000 were fired or lost their badge because of “sexual misconduct. ” Let’s be generous and say 10% keep records. That brings our total of discovered / caught rapist cops to 10,000. That’s 0.5 percent. Now, that does not include the number that have not been caught. I’ll be generous and say that 25% have been found out. That brings the total up to 40,000 rapist cops, or 2% of cops as rapists. 1 in 50. This is not counting cops who are thieves, or racist, or liars who fabricate crimes, or those who like to beat the snot out of people.
I’ve met many good cops in my time. But I’ve also observed that good cops are often railroaded by the way the force operates. (I should also point out that in Australia our police culture is about halfway between the US and the UK.) So while I agree that PZ’s rhetoric is overblown because he applies it to all individual police, he’s definitely correct that the force as a political organisation, including its union has done an awful lot to reinforce the worst behaviour of police officers.
I understand your reference to jihadist terrorism and Muslims in general, but remember that most Muslims do not support violent jihad and are very vocal about it, whereas in the US it’s almost impossible to find a police spokesperson or union leader who won’t defend a cop in any circumstance — up to and including shooting unarmed people in the back or taser-torturing people to death with multiple shocks — unless it’s bringing attention to bad police behaviour at which point any officer trying to do the right thing can expect to be treated as a traitor with death threats, intimidation, and career implosion.
And finally, making up statistics à la Sam Harris is pathetic and misses the point. Nobody is saying that police are more likely to be rapists than the general population, although it’s possible because nobody knows. What people are pointing out is that if a police officer is a rapist, the prevailing culture in law enforcement gives them carte blanche to rape vulnerable people with almost zero chance of repercussion to the officer — as we can see in this case, where Holtzclaw was finally brought to justice because he mistakenly identified a victim as being from his usual target group.
(And the Blue Wall strategy has failed Holtzclaw as well as his victims — his behaviour goes back a long way and escalated because he never got any pushback. If he had been identified earlier, not only would there be fewer victims but he also would have had a chance to rebuild with counselling and rehabilitation and a change of career. It would have been difficult and traumatic for him…but not as much as spending years in prison.)
supergeek
You know, the percentage of bad cops doesn’t matter as long as the rest of them cover their asses. Which makes them “bad cops” as well.
Which is, of course, one of the many differences between “cops” and “muslims”.
+++
carlie
Well, in Penny’s world all those victims should have been sentenced as well, because they’re responsible for Holtzclaw’s actions as well.
supergeek’s numbers made me think of a little thought experiment. Let’s take a million M&Ms, and cake 10000 of them with thallium.
Think supergeek’s would trust that snack? There’s not only the 10000, of course; there’s all the ones rubbbing up against those 10000. They represent the cops who do nothing.
Go ahead, supergeek, they’re your numbers, would you pass out those candies on Halloween?
supergeek123 sez:
Hey look everyone, supergeek just made up a statistic that would be consistent with their made-up vanishing minority narrative thereby proving themself totally right. QED.
Sorry, piegasm @ 41 is me. FTB is really weird about when, where and how it lets me log in as Seven.
@40 Hey guess what? That’s how life works. Unless you have some magic solution to eliminate risk from everything, you are playing the same game, just like everyone else. My original point stands: a vanishingly small percentage of cops being bad is more than enough to account for the number of incidents that we see in a modern society with a continuous news cycle. Should they be held to a higher standard of conduct than a construction worker? Yes. Should we work to point out systemic problems in law enforcement when they are so obvious? Yes. Should we melt down into histrionics and insinuate that every cop on the street is a ticking time bomb itching to shoot minorities? You all seem to think the answer is also yes.
The only histrionics I see are poor poor Danny weeping as he gets what he deserves, and your appeal to emotion with your usual Harrisite transrectal instantiation of data, supergeek.
The rest of us are noting the systemic nature of the problem, and being human beings with a functioning sense of empathy, we are saying that it’s a vastly larger problem than it appears to those privileged to think it’s a “vanishingly small minority”, based on their own narrow experience of the world from the top of the privilege pyramid. We come to this conclusion by considering actual evidence, as noted above, not things you’ve pulled from your ass. As Nerd is wont to say, evidence or STFU, authority fetishist.
Of course NOT everybody is playing by the same rules. The percentage of bad cops towards cis white men, especially middle class, is small. The poorer you get, the larger the percentage. Black? Female? Drug user? Bad cops all around
I feel that it is extremely important that pressure be put on law enforcement as a group and that a simple message encouraging this needs to become an actively spreading political message.
This is important because the criminal cops and authorities in law enforcement are setting and maintaining a social atmosphere that allows all of the abuse we have been seeing get increasing exposure. I say “criminal cops” because I have no problem calling cops that ignore and enable this bad cops. It needs to be said that to be a good cop you need to be actively rooting people like XXXX out of law enforcement, and looking for the punishment of people we know exist in law enforcement. This can be done effectively by public pressure on law enforcement as a whole.
Consider the concept of “peer pressure”. Those emotions and instincts exist for a reason and there is nothing implicitly wrong in outside pressure enforcing their use. A government institution is not like a race, sex, or religion. Those people group based on social role and activity so there is reason to treat them differently as a group when they are literally doing what they are supposed to be responding to and preventing, crime. We can do that and still treat individual members of law enforcement as individuals.
I meant to replace XXXX with Holzclaw when I pasted this from a document in my phone. In all fairness it is a placeholder for people we are concerned about.
Supergeek,
There are a few differences between cops and Muslims. I’ll explain this way:
Let’s say that you have a Muslim who does a very bad thing. Did anyone from their mosque know? If it’s something which happens entirely outside of that environment, I can’t really see them to blame for failing to police or control the behavior of a fellow Muslim. ‘They seemed nice enough around the mosque.’
But let’s say that an imam at a mosque was molesting kids. You would think that some system of accountability would be in place at that mosque for making sure that did not happen, or that if it did, that the imam was reported to the proper authorities and removed.
With the police, what’s going on is much more like the second paragraph. The police should be organized in such a way to make abuses of power unlikely, and they should be dealt with swiftly. Even if a small % of cops did anything wrong, the other cops are failures in creating an environment with adequate accountability. It meant either that they’re lazy and incompetent, or that they’re just looking away, or they’re actively engaged in a cover up. Any of those options could apply, and they’re all fairly damning.
Maybe there are some ‘good cops’ who are somehow kept isolated from the ‘bad cops’ who never have a chance to find out what corruption and brutality is going on. Maybe they’re not to blame, but all their supervisors are. And police have shown, time and time again that they’ll fight against increased transparency or accountability. Even the good cops are guilty of that. And good cops don’t live in a bubble. Why don’t we ever hear police denouncing other cops? At least some Muslims will denounce bad Muslims. With cops it’s more ‘please, donate to this asshole’s defense fund’
supergeek123: “My original point stands: a vanishingly small percentage of cops being bad is more than enough to account for the number of incidents that we see in a modern society with a continuous news cycle.”
Uh, no your point doesn’t stand. You continue to miss the point. We’re not saying that having one cop convicted of rape proves that all cops are bad. We’re saying that the culture of law enforcement allows abusive behaviour to persist and in some cases even flourish. What we’re seeing in this case is years of abuse of many women by a cop in uniform. It’s very hard to believe that none of his colleagues and supervisors were aware. And his behaviour only came to light because on one occasion he mistakenly picked a victim who was not from his usual intimidatable population.
So what does it tell you about police accountability when more than a dozen abused women over several years were too afraid to report it? What does it tell you that it took a middle-class victim with no criminal record to be abused before anything was done about this officer’s repeated predatory behaviour?
Except that if the Islamic sect in question is anything like the average Christian church, most recently highlighted by the Catholic scandals, they won’t be. The imam will be assumed to be a good person and the kids to be lying. Or the imam might be quietly moved to another mosque, if enough people are making a fuss.
The bottom line is that no group can be trusted with absolute unsupervised authority. People who have power over others should have more oversight and stricter rules, not less oversight and laxer enforcement as the police (and priests–and likely imam, though I don’t know enough about Islam to prove that) have.
supergeek @ 43
The Daniel Holtzclaws of the world don’t tattoo “I use my authority as a police officer to rape vulnerable black women” on their foreheads. And the legal system has demonstrated amply that it’s extremely reluctant to ever hold any of its own accountable for anything at all. So yes. Yes, we treat every cop as if they’re a ticking time bomb itching to do something terrible. That’s rational behavior, not histrionics.
Holtzclaw’s conviction and sentence are well deserved, but it follows a distrubing trend.
Which cops are being arrested and tried, and which ones get to walk free? It seems that (most of the time) white cops get cleared and non-white cops are thrown to the wolves. Holtzclaw is of half-Japanese descent, the two New Orleans cops arrested for the shooting of a six year old are black. Three of the murderers of Freddie Gray are white, but they were arrested as a group, the other three are black.
Aside from the South Carolina cop caught on video murdering Walter Scott, I can’t recall any white cops facing such strong charges. In most other high profile cases (Eric Garner, Tamar Rice, Michael Brown, etc.) the white cops were allowed to walk free, not even a reprimand.
Some have expressed surprised that an all-white jury convicted him, but let’s not forget they’re civilans, not cops. The visible corruption and criminality of cops has grown exponentially since Rodney King. Even if the jury weren’t progressive and enlightened, people are now more willing to believe their own eyes than the word of a cop.
supergeek:
I find it interesting that you default to histrionics in a thread about a serial rapist. If you bother to think, rather than simply react, you might discover the toxic sexism underpinning your ideas here. And please, if all you have is kneejerk response, please don’t. We are all sexist, there’s no way to escape it. As always, the trick is to become aware of that, and look to your own unexamined biases and Bayesian priors first.
IIRC, the black officers were charged with more serious crimes in that case than the white officers.
Cops regularly make public statements indicating just how awful they are. Cops regularly engage in mass actions of bad behavior, some of which are extremely protracted. Very few cops will ever speak out about the worst cops or bad police culture, but defend it instead. Cops still haven’t fired their even worse unions, which spout some seriously crazy shit even when the police in general don’t agree. Even “OK” cops frequently reveal themselves to be prejudiced and display severe lack of critical thinking abilities. Cops routinely conduct ridiculous operations, maiming and killing innocent people, then continue to brutalize and detain those after it is clear they have made egregious errors in conducting an operation in the first place. Cops regularly violate laws and constitutional rights (which is OK cool because it happens fast enough or they had good intentions according to the courts). Cops regularly engage in civil asset forfeiture far outside it’s original intention to take stuff from innocent people just because the can, and they want stuff. Cops keep becoming more militarized because they can, on the flimsiest of pretexts, and do things like “lose” entire aircraft, somehow.
I give up on listing anything else, this is just stupid. There are all kinds of bad cops. They don’t have to be rapists or murderers to rise to the level of bad.
Are there good cops? Sure. And sometimes they get screwed for it. Are there otherwise decent cops who won’t go against their buddies or the system when pressured? Yeah. And in a lot of cases that makes them bad, especially given their societal role and power. Other groups where so many are badly behaved or covering for those with that behavior would easily be called bad in their entirety. Actually, even for a lot less. It’s the ones with power and authority which make excuses, and are excused by apologists. At the top of this are the militaries, intelligence agencies, and law enforcement organizations, which always seek more power, and cannot be criticized or limited or investigated because that would reveal too much to bad guys, and disrupt their operations, and civilization would just collapse and burn.
Fuck this 0.01% horseshit.
I guess no one remembers Frank Serpico.
The Police Are Still Out of Control
Given that multiple studies have revealed that cops are nearly twice as likely than the average population to abuse their domestic partners, I’m pretty comfortable saying that. Since rape and domestic abuse are two points on the same spectrum.
Also, consider that “the population” includes all people including those who are not men and who are not white. White men compose about 31% of the US population but are over 60% of police officers. Just by sheer dint of men being over-represented, it would be an absolute shock if being a police officer didn’t increase your odds of being a rapist.
The very fact that policing is so heavily weighted towards white men should be an alarm bell in and of itself.