Accusations of Sexual Abuse by NY Police
Posted on Thu Dec 08, 2005 at 07:25:22 AM EST
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by TChris
Two New York police officers have been accused of sexually assaulting three women. In November, the officers approached a woman who was stopped at a red light in Brooklyn.
Investigators said one of the officers leaned into her car and rubbed his hand on her leg and both officers followed her home on the pretext of making sure she arrived safely, but assaulted her once they got there while her child and her brother's two children were sleeping inside.
DNA belonging to one officer was found in the woman’s apartment. A month earlier, the same officers groped two women in their apartment when they responded to a noise complaint, according to complaints the women filed after realizing the same officers had committed other assaults.
Sexual abuse of women by police officers isn’t limited to New York.
Samuel Walker, a professor emeritus of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, has studied what he said was a growing list of abuse against women committed by on-duty police officers. [Sometimes it involves officers who stop women on the pretext of traffic violations, a practice he refers to as ‘driving while female,’ but other times officers take aim at prostitutes or women at home.]
Mr. Walker wrote a paper about what he said was a nationwide phenomenon in 2002, [noting that it was a form of police misconduct prevalent throughout the nation. His paper cited cases in Texas, Chicago and on Long Island.]
"What we found is that a number of these incidents involved prostitutes, so they were not always involving traffic stops," he said. "There were a number of other patterns where it's other things; a call to a house, and then some misconduct occurs."
(Bracketed additions are from the Times print edition.)
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