Hiding in Plain Sight: Driving While Female
To bfp and Maia and other women who care so deeply about these issues.
An interesting and informative brochure has been created to help stop police brutality against women of color and trans people of color by Incite! Women of Color Against Violence.
It requires Adobe Acrobat to read but is filled with information about serious problems including sexual violence, the handling of domestic violence calls and racial profiling reported by these communities in cities all over the country.
There were so many issues covered that it's impossible to blog about them all, except in a serial fashion, so we'll start with the topic of "driving while female".
I was thinking about the issue of driving while female especially after a conversation I had with an individual whose loved one was one of the victims of a former Riverside Police Department officer named Eric Hanby.
Hanby was investigated and later prosecuted for sexual assaulting women in the early 1990s. When he went to trial, he was acquitted by a jury but the department fired him, although I was told he might still be working for a smaller law enforcement agency in the state. If that's true, then it's a sad commentary that odious behavior like that he engaged in can still get you hired in the law enforcement profession but then at least one smaller agency hired a registered sex offender.
The profession needs to stop doing so if it respects what it stands for and organizations representing the different ranks of police officers should together work on issues in the hiring and recruitment processes that cause many smaller law enforcement agencies to dip into really bad hiring pools to fill their ranks.
Was Hanby's behavior strictly an isolated example of a "bad apple" in the Riverside Police Department or in law enforcement in general, or is it more a serious problem stemming from sexism within the profession not to mention its agencies. With a string of deputies, both field and correctional, from the Riverside County Sheriff's Department who are facing criminal prosecution for committing sexual assault under the color of authority, in several cases involving multiple women, that's a question that's being asked more and more.
The epidemic of sheriff deputies arrested for sexual crimes in Riverside County not to mention the prosecution of San Bernardino Police Department officer, Ronald VanRossum led to an exploration of this issue in the Press Enterprise in 2004.
(excerpt, Press Enterprise)
Most agencies have policies dictating what peace officers should do when they have members of the opposite sex in their custody, Deal said. The officers are required to notify dispatch of their location and destination and mileage, policies that protect inmates and officers alike.
The Riverside County Sheriff's Department has such a policy, Doyle said. But ultimately agencies rely on the honesty of an individual to follow it.
Any officer who commits a crime thinks he is above the law, Kamau said.
"Any cop who operates in this conduct has been doing it for some time before he got caught. At some point, this cop assesses the situation around him and came to the conclusion that he could engage in this behavior and not get caught or engage in this behavior and not get penalized," he said.
Such conduct affects other officers, said Kamau, who said he dismisses any police leader who talks of his or her organization being large and calls unacceptable behavior the result of a "few bad apples."
He said he makes an analogy with the airline industry.
"Is it acceptable to have a few drunk pilots on the planes because it's a large organization?" he said.
"It's really just a shell game when they tell you it's a few rotten apples. My point of view is that the barrel has a lot of apples and there is bacteria, and that will affect all the other apples."
An example of one of those "bad apples" lately, is apparently San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department deputy, Matthew Linderman who faces multiple felony charges. And so it goes as it's gone before.
Autumn, 1991 in downtown Riverside
About 16 years ago, I was downtown on a quiet Sunday afternoon and saw a squad car parked by the north-west corner of the intersection of Market and University. I looked at it and noticed that the window was down on the driver's side and that there was more than one person in the car. It was a male police officer and a woman.
The officer was what many women would describe as good-looking. He had dark hair, tanned skin and wore a thick gold wedding band which I saw when he took a look at me, opened his door further as it had been ajar and shoved the woman out of the driver's side of the car. She landed in the street, he closed the car and he took off down University in a westerly direction before turning right on a street behind the bus station.
The woman got up on her feet and started running, but one of her shoes was off so she gave up after a few steps but was yelling something at the departing squad car which I couldn't understand.
I was shocked. I didn't know what I had just seen but it didn't look appropriate, let alone professional police conduct. Pretty blatant even considering how quiet and unpopulated downtown Riverside was back then. Hopefully, the years of change in the department has eradicated that type of misconduct but given that sometimes it can take up to a dozen years or longer to catch an officer doing it and bring him to justice, you can never be really all that sure.
I didn't complain though I did think about it but back then, I didn't know anyone could complain about police officers or that systems to do so existed. It's just as well that I didn't because back in 1991 was also back in the day when the complaints that were filed to the department were alleged tossed in the circular file. That's what even what former State Attorney General Bill Lockyer said happened in those days. Back even before former Chief Ken Fortier's failed attempts to reform the complaint system.
After all, it would take the state of California, with lawsuit in hand and a citywide outcry for civilian oversight, to do that.
Driving While Female is complex though, because it often intersects with what's called Driving While Black or Brown when it happens to women of color. And women in these ethnic and racial groups are more likely to encounter Driving While Female than are White women, though many of the most highly publicized cases that result in splashy investigations have involved White middle-class women. Driving While female combined with Driving While Black or Brown makes life difficult for women of color and fosters much of the sentiment that law enforcement agencies aren't there to protect and serve them, just police them and occupy their neighborhoods.
An excellent definition of the various forms of racial profiling is here courtesy of the ACLU and another one is here by Amnesty International. Racial profiling impacts both men and women of color. Gender profiling can impact men of color as well, because in most cases in most law enforcement agencies, men are more likely to be pulled over by officers than women are. That's the case with the Riverside Police Department, according to the annual traffic stop studies it conducted between 2002-2005. The much anticipated return of these studies beginning next year should reveal similar statistics.
Kenita Nichols and Mercedes Johnson, two young Black women, filed lawsuits in relation to being racially profiled by Chesterfield Township Police Department officers. Their case is hardly isolated. They were arrested because a robbery had taken place even though their vehicle didn't match the description of the vehicle used in the crime.
As we know, Black women have been shot to death inside vehicles, in Chicago, Portland, Oregon and here in Riverside.
Some of the categories of problems encountered by women who encountered police officers while driving or riding in cars include the following:
Driving While Female and denied rape kit
A woman arrested in Austin on a DUI was denied access to a rape kit and toxicology screening after making allegations that she may have been drugged and then sexually assaulted. Unfortunately, this isn't an isolated incident. Women who report rape particularly women of color have been arrested instead on old warrants including for misdemeanors and denied access to rape kits.
The Austin case led to litigation and I contacted a captain in Austin for more information but he said he couldn't comment until the litigation was resolved in a year or so, but that there was a whole other side of the story. Here's the side that's been told so far.
(excerpt, Austin Chronicle)
What began as a routine Friday payday -- "a mom's afternoon" with her best friend Charlotte Hughes -- turned into a fractured evening that, to this day, Glore barely remembers. By 11pm that night she'd totaled her husband's rare, "cherry" Ford Thunderbird, smashed out the rear passenger window of an Austin Police Department squad car, and landed herself in the Travis County Jail on a charge of driving while intoxicated. That wasn't all -- indeed, that was far from the worst.
The next day Glore awoke, or came to -- Glore says she doesn't know which it was -- in the city's central booking facility. Hughes picked her up, and brought more disturbing revelations. "When I got in the car with Charlotte," Glore remembers, "the first thing she says is, 'Girl, we were drugged.' When she said that, I started to shake. I could feel it in my gut. I said, 'I want to go to the hospital.'"
Even before Glore left the jail she had begun to realize that something was very wrong. She was bruised, cut, bloody, and burned. Her fingernails were torn, her clothes filthy and her underwear stained -- and she didn't remember how any of this had happened. She says she had flashes and impressions -- for example, looking at the round cigarette-like burn she discovered on her foot while still in a holding cell. "I realized that I had a round burn on the top of my foot," she said. "And every time I look at it I get this impression of people going, well, 'How will she react to this?' And then someone burning me. This is an impression; I don't know if it's what happened, but it is the impression and the feeling that I get every time I see it." Impressions and feelings, along with the soiled underwear and her numerous cuts and bruises, were all Glore knew of what had happened that August evening. For her, the empirical evidence dovetailed into an inevitable conclusion: Glore became convinced that not only had she been drugged, but that she had also been raped.
When Glore arrived the next evening at South Austin Hospital, she told the emergency room staff what she believed had happened, and asked that the staff give her a rape kit test and a toxicological screen. "The tox screen was especially important to me," she said. "Then I felt I could prove that I had been drugged, that all of this had happened." The ER staff alerted the APD that Glore wanted to file a report and that she wanted the tests -- standard operating procedure in rape or sexual assault cases.
The officers who responded to the call from the hospital took her report and called it in to APD's sex crimes unit, she said, but when headquarters radioed back, Glore was horrified. The officers told her they knew she'd spent the night in jail on a DWI, she said, and moreover they believed she was fabricating the whole drug and rape story in order to evade the misdemeanor charge. In short, the APD explicitly denied Glore access to the rape kit test and the tox screen -- even after Glore said she herself would pay for the exams. Glore's medical report from South Austin Hospital confirms her story. "Also noted APD was here," reads the ER report, "and they felt that this patient's story was fabricated, that she has this lapse in memory and they think this is just all a scheme to get out of her DUI [sic]... They [APD] are not going to approve of [the] rape exam, and they are not going to take her to the SANE [sexual assault nurse exam] nurse at St. David's."
Driving While Female and sexual harassment
Wallkill, New York became the second city in the United States two weeks behind Riverside to have its police department placed under a state consent decree, which happened in 2001. The court-mandated reform process was an end result of an investigation conducted by the New York State Attorney General's office into allegations that police officers stopped female motorists and sexually abused and harassed them.
When California State Attorney General Bill Lockyer spoke about Wallkill which was breathing down Riverside's neck to become the first department to be placed under a state consent decree, he called it a case of "Driving While Blond" but for the women involved, it was no joke as it isn't for women who have shared their experiences.
It was no joke for the newspaper that reported on the sexual harassment of female motorists by Wallkill Police Department and faced retaliation in response.
Here are the allegations made against Wallkill's police department by the state attorney general's office.
(excerpt)
Among the illegal actions alleged in the 54-page complaint are the following:
Police officers stopped female motorists – often at night and on lightly traveled roads – to solicit dates or sexual favors. At times the uniformed officers would make sexually suggestive comments or implied that falsified charges could be dropped if the women would agree to go out on dates with them.
Police officers harassed women at their places of employment and elsewhere. In one instance, a uniformed male police officer forced a woman to partially disrobe, and subsequently interrogated her about her sexual past, when there was no valid law enforcement reason for either action. In another instance, a uniformed officer repeatedly visited a local dining establishment where he grabbed several 16-year old waitresses around the waist and hips or putt his hand on their thighs. The officer also repeatedly made sexually suggestive comments, for example, asking what the waitresses would look like if they took their shirts off. Although parents complained to the Town about this officer, no disciplinary action was ever taken.
Police officers harassed Wallkill citizens who questioned or spoke out about police conduct.police conduct.
Police officers ticketed Middletown Times Herald Record delivery trucks in a coordinated effort to retaliate against the newspaper for news articles critical of the department.
In 2002, the department had greatly improved its assigned monitor told the New York Times.
(excerpt)
''I think it is a department in transition and moving in the right direction,'' Mr. Esserman said yesterday in a phone interview from his office at Thacher Associates, a private investigative and monitoring firm in New York City.
The 37-page report noted that the Police Department had installed video cameras in patrol cars, but officers sometimes failed to turn on the cameras or the microphones. It also said that officers often did not record all required information when stopping drivers, and were known to turn in ''sloppy paperwork'' with the wrong dates and patrol car numbers, among other things.
Still, the report acknowledged that there had been no more ''ugly allegations'' of misconduct and that the Police Department had forged better relationships with other law enforcement agencies. The report said: ''The complaints from other local law enforcement agencies about the lack of professionalism and cooperation by Wallkill have abated. One has the sense that the Wallkill P.D. hit bottom and in the last seven months has begun the upward climb.''
Asst. State Attorney General Mark Peters was cautiously optimistic, said the department was no longer a threat to public safety but had this to say.
(excerpt)
''At the same time the attorney general's office is pleased that the immediate danger has been dealt with, we take very seriously the failure to follow all the oversights, such as video cameras and stop forms, because they are what prevent a department from slipping back again,'' he said.
In 2006, Wallkill completed its decree, hopefully a much better department including in terms of how it treats women.
Driving While Female and sexually abused
Wallkill's police department wasn't the only small law enforcement agency in New York state that employed officers who harassed female motorists.
In Suffolk County, Highway Patrol officer Frank Wright was sentenced to serve five years in prison in a courtroom in Central Islip after he was convicted of sexually abusing four women including one who was forced to strip down to their underwear and then walk in 38 degree weather while holding her clothing.
And in Nassau County, a police officer was charged with forcing a woman to have oral sex with him, according to this New York Times article.
(excerpt)
The allegations have led to investigations by local police forces and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, two grand jury proceedings, a lawsuit by the state and a change in Nassau police policy. In several cases, including this latest one, news reports about the women's complaints have prompted others to come forward, sometimes about incidents that took place months or years earlier.
''Often when people come forward, they discover that things are more widespread, and it means other people come forward with other types of stories, more readily,'' said Nancy Duff Campbell, co-president of the National Women's Law Center in Washington, which has been following the New York cases. ''This is exactly the kind of thing people wouldn't like to come forward with, but there is strength in numbers.''
Officer Murphy, 36, was arrested Thursday night at the Eighth Precinct station house in Levittown. The police said that after a witness came forward with information this week -- prompted by other recent allegations of assaults by police officers -- they interviewed a woman who said that in December 1999, Officer Murphy ordered her to follow his police cruiser in her car to a wooded area in West Farmingdale, where he sodomized her.
Officer Murphy is also under investigation by the Nassau Police Department's Internal Affairs Unit about a woman's claim of a similar assault last August, when, she says, she was forced to perform oral sex on a plainclothes officer in exchange for her release after a drunk-driving stop, the police said. Although the department would not call Officer Murphy a suspect in that case, it placed him on administrative assignment this week. It is also investigating why the woman's complaint was not looked into immediately by the Internal Affairs Unit but instead languished for five months.
Driving While Female and miscarrying
In Kansas City earlier this year, Sofia Salva miscarried after she was arrested and thrown in jail. She's shown on video pleading with the two officers, who were later suspended, to take her to the hospital because she's bleeding.
(excerpt)
The suspensions came two days after police released a videotape showing Sofia Salva telling officers during her arrest last year that she was three months pregnant, bleeding and needed to go to a hospital. The tape shows officers ignoring her pleas.
After the ninth request, the tape shows, a female officer asked: "How is that my problem?"
The officers' behavior is "inconsistent with the values and policies of this department and inconsistent with the training they received in the police academy," Chief James Corwin said at a news conference Thursday.
Driving While Female and murdered
Then there was Cara Knott, the young woman who was strangled to death by a California Highway Patrol officer during a traffic stop in Craig Peyer was convicted of the murder and had before his arrest, been chosen to provide televised safety tips for women after Knott's murder. Recently, Peyer declined the requests of a prosecutor to submit a sample of DNA to be tested against evidence.
Studies have been conducted by researchers examining the "Driving While Female" behavior shown at law enforcement agencies and whether it's truly a case of "rogue" officers or "bad apples" or a systemic problem. It's probably a combination of both. Every law enforcement agency had officers who feel it's their right to abuse their power and public trust to commit misconduct including criminal conduct against women. But it's how an agency handles it or doesn't handle it that determines the systemic nature of the problem and many agencies have practices that encourage these officers to flourish even as they are committing serious misconduct including crimes on the job or even off of it.
Dr. Samuel Walker and Dawn Irlbeck, from the University of Nebraska, Omaha drafted an amazing research paper called Driving While Female: A National Problem in Police Misconduct
An Indianapolis Police Department officer for example had his statistics for his traffic stops broken down by gender and it was discovered that 89% of the motorists he stopped were female. Not surprisingly, he wound up getting into serious trouble for misconduct against women and is no longer in law enforcement.
The study done by Walker and Irlbeck discusses strategies for addressing problems in police departments that involve crimes and other serious misconduct committed by women by their officers. One of the most pressing issues, the study stated, was addressing what it called the sexist culture that exists in most law enforcement agencies. Signs of a sexist police culture include the following.
(excerpt)
(1) employment discrimination against women, including the failure to promote women to supervisory positions;[14]
(2) tolerance of sexual harassment within the department;[15]
(3) a systematic failure to investigate domestic violence incidents where the alleged perpetrator is an officer in the department;[16]
(4) inadequate policies regarding pregnancy and parental leave.[17]
Because police departments in general tend to have isolated, insulated cultures, it's hard for people on the outside of them to know how they fare when it comes to identifying a sexist culture, let alone addressing one.
Recommendations from the study were to collect statistics involving race and gender of motorists pulled over on traffic stops. One clue to look for in these stops is to see whether or not the officers disproportionately stop women, given that women are much less likely to be stopped by a police officer than men are.
An Indianapolis Police Department officer for example had his statistics for his traffic stops broken down by gender and it was discovered that 89% of the motorists he stopped were female. Not surprisingly, he wound up getting into serious trouble for misconduct against women and is no longer in law enforcement.
Also having adequate supervision of police officers while they are working in the field. Having a complaint system in place that is implemented properly and increasing the number of female officers through all the ranks in a police agency, because women are at much lower risk of this type of behavior than their male counterparts.
Tracking complaints is also useful. An agency can ask itself this. Do you have an officer or officers who's primarily getting complaints filed by women, for different allegations? How are these investigations conducted and do the complaints keep coming in from different women even if an officer is exonerated? Do you have officers who tell sexist or sexual jokes or engage in such banter out in the field? To other officers, male and/or female? To women out in the field that they encounter? If a supervising sergeant is out in the field and witnesses this banter, how does he or she respond? Does he or she respond?
How does the agency handle sexual discrimination and sexual harassment complaints filed by its employees? Does it investigate them as thoroughly as it recites those policies so quickly on request? Does it instead ignore, retaliate, terminate, or blackball those female officers when they try to get employed elsewhere. Does it tell the women who complain how unhappy it is that they did complain?
Do the racial discrimination and harassment policies have teeth? Are the sexual discrimination and harassment policies enforced? Are they simply pieces of paper with writing on them? Are those who harass women in law enforcement and in the field seen as the problems or are the women who complain seen as the problems? Does an agency educate its employees on filing complaints of harassment and then turn around and punish them when they do? Does an agency educate the public on how to file complaints of harassment and then punish them when they do?
To the officers, who witness misconduct by other officers, one could ask this. Do you tell the officer to knock it off and why? Do you report it to a supervisor? Do you stand there in silence and do nothing? Do you participate? Are you one of those problem officers?
Training officers, the ambassadors to the department's culture, do you train your officers not to engage in this conduct through your own example? Do you educate your officers on the harassment policies? Do you accept their complaints and not treat them badly for doing so? Are you the problem officer?
To supervisors, if an officer in their rank is making sexual or sexist comments, what do you do? Do you tell that officer to knock it off and why? Do you report that officer to their supervisor? Do you sit there and do nothing? Do you engage in it? Are you the problem?
To the management, do you mandate and promote an environment that discourages racism and sexism on your watch? Do you create and implement policies in this area which actually have teeth to them? Do you encourage people to use the policies or do you punish them after the fact? Do you engage in this bad behavior or do nothing? Are you the problem?
These are some questions from which to start.
But members of the public have to step up and report the conduct too, and though I didn't back then, I would certainly do so now if the complainant was willing to do so. The problem is when filing a complaint on someone else's behalf as a witness is that you don't know what will happen to that person as a result. Will they be fairly treated or will they be punished?
For a civilian witness, it's not the same thing because if officers report this conduct, their word is given greater credence by investigators and taken much more seriously. That greater credence given to officers is shown by the much higher rate of sustaining investigations generated inhouse than those by complainants. It's very difficult listening to complaints of misconduct for example and trying to respect people's wishes to not file complaints due to fear for their safety or that of their families. It's sad that the only prayer that women who are victimized by police officers often have is that a brave officer will do his job and report that officer, thus putting a bit of a dent in the code of silence philosophy that still pervades most law enforcement agencies.
Both have happened to women who do file these complaints in terms of being treated fairly or being treated badly.
One obvious problem is that many women are too embarrassed or too fearful to report sexual misconduct whether it's a joke that makes them uncomfortable or worse so a lot of this conduct probably goes unreported. They fear retaliation if they do come forward or having to deal with an agency that often looks at them as less than human and backs its own. So what often happens is that these officers who engage in this misconduct like Van Rossum do so for years, before they finally get caught.
But not always.
One woman who alleged that she was raped by a police officer working for an Orange County agency reported the crime while being contacted for a customer satisfaction survey for another law enforcement agency. When the person conducting the survey heard her story, an investigation was initiated by the involved agency and criminal charges were filed against an officer
Sista II Sista is planning several strategies to address police misconduct against women of color at meetings it's been holding.
(excerpt)
Isabel Gonzalez spoke next, emphasizing that the "solution to violence against women does not lie with the cops." She said, "In our experiences, the police sexually harass women in the community and women get harassed by the cops [when they are victims of] domestic violence because of the patriarchal structure of the police department." She added that "the cops can't protect girls from harassment by other boys," when they are doing the harassment themselves.
She said they have been working on alternatives to fighting violence against women without involving the police department. They have also been working on a campaign to publicize police sexual harassment of women: in a program they call "CopWatch," in which they will videotape incidents of police harassment of girls in the 831 precinct and then take the videotape to the precinct headquarters to show it to police. They will also hold a press conference to show the videotape to the media and hope to display the video in other places around the community.
More on the issues of gender and policing to come in this continuing series on these issues.
Riverside's city government will be holding public meetings at various occasions to receive input on how the latest round of Community Development Block Grant funds should be spent. They've been handling it through this system since the city council voted to dissolve the community organizations which oversaw the dispersion of funds in their CDBG zones.
The decision of scheduling judge, Gary Tranbarger of the Riverside County Superior Court to dismiss several misdemeanor cases due to a lack of courtrooms to hear them was upheld during its appeal, according to the Press Enterprise.
(excerpt)
The judicial panel's decision sided with Tranbarger and Riverside County court administrators, saying the absence of precise language in Penal Code 1050a about civil courts means the courts can use discretion in applying it.
"The trial court is permitted to consider the circumstances of each case in exercising its discretion in determining whether to give a particular criminal case precedence over a particular civil action or proceeding," the decision said.
"I can't comment on a pending case, but we will continue to comply with all orders of the court." Fields, the presiding judge, said Monday.
The ruling will not make a change in how cases currently facing dismissal are argued, said Assistant Public Defender Bryant Villagran.
"This gives guidance to parties as to what the appellate position might be, but it doesn't get rid of the problem," Villagran said. "So each side will continue to assert their position until it plays out at the appellate level."
In Orange County, the sheriff there, Michael Corona has been indicted by a federal grand jury
The blog, Inside Riverside more than hinted about these latest developments in that episode.
An interesting and informative brochure has been created to help stop police brutality against women of color and trans people of color by Incite! Women of Color Against Violence.
It requires Adobe Acrobat to read but is filled with information about serious problems including sexual violence, the handling of domestic violence calls and racial profiling reported by these communities in cities all over the country.
There were so many issues covered that it's impossible to blog about them all, except in a serial fashion, so we'll start with the topic of "driving while female".
I was thinking about the issue of driving while female especially after a conversation I had with an individual whose loved one was one of the victims of a former Riverside Police Department officer named Eric Hanby.
Hanby was investigated and later prosecuted for sexual assaulting women in the early 1990s. When he went to trial, he was acquitted by a jury but the department fired him, although I was told he might still be working for a smaller law enforcement agency in the state. If that's true, then it's a sad commentary that odious behavior like that he engaged in can still get you hired in the law enforcement profession but then at least one smaller agency hired a registered sex offender.
The profession needs to stop doing so if it respects what it stands for and organizations representing the different ranks of police officers should together work on issues in the hiring and recruitment processes that cause many smaller law enforcement agencies to dip into really bad hiring pools to fill their ranks.
Was Hanby's behavior strictly an isolated example of a "bad apple" in the Riverside Police Department or in law enforcement in general, or is it more a serious problem stemming from sexism within the profession not to mention its agencies. With a string of deputies, both field and correctional, from the Riverside County Sheriff's Department who are facing criminal prosecution for committing sexual assault under the color of authority, in several cases involving multiple women, that's a question that's being asked more and more.
The epidemic of sheriff deputies arrested for sexual crimes in Riverside County not to mention the prosecution of San Bernardino Police Department officer, Ronald VanRossum led to an exploration of this issue in the Press Enterprise in 2004.
(excerpt, Press Enterprise)
Most agencies have policies dictating what peace officers should do when they have members of the opposite sex in their custody, Deal said. The officers are required to notify dispatch of their location and destination and mileage, policies that protect inmates and officers alike.
The Riverside County Sheriff's Department has such a policy, Doyle said. But ultimately agencies rely on the honesty of an individual to follow it.
Any officer who commits a crime thinks he is above the law, Kamau said.
"Any cop who operates in this conduct has been doing it for some time before he got caught. At some point, this cop assesses the situation around him and came to the conclusion that he could engage in this behavior and not get caught or engage in this behavior and not get penalized," he said.
Such conduct affects other officers, said Kamau, who said he dismisses any police leader who talks of his or her organization being large and calls unacceptable behavior the result of a "few bad apples."
He said he makes an analogy with the airline industry.
"Is it acceptable to have a few drunk pilots on the planes because it's a large organization?" he said.
"It's really just a shell game when they tell you it's a few rotten apples. My point of view is that the barrel has a lot of apples and there is bacteria, and that will affect all the other apples."
An example of one of those "bad apples" lately, is apparently San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department deputy, Matthew Linderman who faces multiple felony charges. And so it goes as it's gone before.
Autumn, 1991 in downtown Riverside
About 16 years ago, I was downtown on a quiet Sunday afternoon and saw a squad car parked by the north-west corner of the intersection of Market and University. I looked at it and noticed that the window was down on the driver's side and that there was more than one person in the car. It was a male police officer and a woman.
The officer was what many women would describe as good-looking. He had dark hair, tanned skin and wore a thick gold wedding band which I saw when he took a look at me, opened his door further as it had been ajar and shoved the woman out of the driver's side of the car. She landed in the street, he closed the car and he took off down University in a westerly direction before turning right on a street behind the bus station.
The woman got up on her feet and started running, but one of her shoes was off so she gave up after a few steps but was yelling something at the departing squad car which I couldn't understand.
I was shocked. I didn't know what I had just seen but it didn't look appropriate, let alone professional police conduct. Pretty blatant even considering how quiet and unpopulated downtown Riverside was back then. Hopefully, the years of change in the department has eradicated that type of misconduct but given that sometimes it can take up to a dozen years or longer to catch an officer doing it and bring him to justice, you can never be really all that sure.
I didn't complain though I did think about it but back then, I didn't know anyone could complain about police officers or that systems to do so existed. It's just as well that I didn't because back in 1991 was also back in the day when the complaints that were filed to the department were alleged tossed in the circular file. That's what even what former State Attorney General Bill Lockyer said happened in those days. Back even before former Chief Ken Fortier's failed attempts to reform the complaint system.
After all, it would take the state of California, with lawsuit in hand and a citywide outcry for civilian oversight, to do that.
Driving While Female is complex though, because it often intersects with what's called Driving While Black or Brown when it happens to women of color. And women in these ethnic and racial groups are more likely to encounter Driving While Female than are White women, though many of the most highly publicized cases that result in splashy investigations have involved White middle-class women. Driving While female combined with Driving While Black or Brown makes life difficult for women of color and fosters much of the sentiment that law enforcement agencies aren't there to protect and serve them, just police them and occupy their neighborhoods.
An excellent definition of the various forms of racial profiling is here courtesy of the ACLU and another one is here by Amnesty International. Racial profiling impacts both men and women of color. Gender profiling can impact men of color as well, because in most cases in most law enforcement agencies, men are more likely to be pulled over by officers than women are. That's the case with the Riverside Police Department, according to the annual traffic stop studies it conducted between 2002-2005. The much anticipated return of these studies beginning next year should reveal similar statistics.
Kenita Nichols and Mercedes Johnson, two young Black women, filed lawsuits in relation to being racially profiled by Chesterfield Township Police Department officers. Their case is hardly isolated. They were arrested because a robbery had taken place even though their vehicle didn't match the description of the vehicle used in the crime.
As we know, Black women have been shot to death inside vehicles, in Chicago, Portland, Oregon and here in Riverside.
Some of the categories of problems encountered by women who encountered police officers while driving or riding in cars include the following:
Driving While Female and denied rape kit
A woman arrested in Austin on a DUI was denied access to a rape kit and toxicology screening after making allegations that she may have been drugged and then sexually assaulted. Unfortunately, this isn't an isolated incident. Women who report rape particularly women of color have been arrested instead on old warrants including for misdemeanors and denied access to rape kits.
The Austin case led to litigation and I contacted a captain in Austin for more information but he said he couldn't comment until the litigation was resolved in a year or so, but that there was a whole other side of the story. Here's the side that's been told so far.
(excerpt, Austin Chronicle)
What began as a routine Friday payday -- "a mom's afternoon" with her best friend Charlotte Hughes -- turned into a fractured evening that, to this day, Glore barely remembers. By 11pm that night she'd totaled her husband's rare, "cherry" Ford Thunderbird, smashed out the rear passenger window of an Austin Police Department squad car, and landed herself in the Travis County Jail on a charge of driving while intoxicated. That wasn't all -- indeed, that was far from the worst.
The next day Glore awoke, or came to -- Glore says she doesn't know which it was -- in the city's central booking facility. Hughes picked her up, and brought more disturbing revelations. "When I got in the car with Charlotte," Glore remembers, "the first thing she says is, 'Girl, we were drugged.' When she said that, I started to shake. I could feel it in my gut. I said, 'I want to go to the hospital.'"
Even before Glore left the jail she had begun to realize that something was very wrong. She was bruised, cut, bloody, and burned. Her fingernails were torn, her clothes filthy and her underwear stained -- and she didn't remember how any of this had happened. She says she had flashes and impressions -- for example, looking at the round cigarette-like burn she discovered on her foot while still in a holding cell. "I realized that I had a round burn on the top of my foot," she said. "And every time I look at it I get this impression of people going, well, 'How will she react to this?' And then someone burning me. This is an impression; I don't know if it's what happened, but it is the impression and the feeling that I get every time I see it." Impressions and feelings, along with the soiled underwear and her numerous cuts and bruises, were all Glore knew of what had happened that August evening. For her, the empirical evidence dovetailed into an inevitable conclusion: Glore became convinced that not only had she been drugged, but that she had also been raped.
When Glore arrived the next evening at South Austin Hospital, she told the emergency room staff what she believed had happened, and asked that the staff give her a rape kit test and a toxicological screen. "The tox screen was especially important to me," she said. "Then I felt I could prove that I had been drugged, that all of this had happened." The ER staff alerted the APD that Glore wanted to file a report and that she wanted the tests -- standard operating procedure in rape or sexual assault cases.
The officers who responded to the call from the hospital took her report and called it in to APD's sex crimes unit, she said, but when headquarters radioed back, Glore was horrified. The officers told her they knew she'd spent the night in jail on a DWI, she said, and moreover they believed she was fabricating the whole drug and rape story in order to evade the misdemeanor charge. In short, the APD explicitly denied Glore access to the rape kit test and the tox screen -- even after Glore said she herself would pay for the exams. Glore's medical report from South Austin Hospital confirms her story. "Also noted APD was here," reads the ER report, "and they felt that this patient's story was fabricated, that she has this lapse in memory and they think this is just all a scheme to get out of her DUI [sic]... They [APD] are not going to approve of [the] rape exam, and they are not going to take her to the SANE [sexual assault nurse exam] nurse at St. David's."
Driving While Female and sexual harassment
Wallkill, New York became the second city in the United States two weeks behind Riverside to have its police department placed under a state consent decree, which happened in 2001. The court-mandated reform process was an end result of an investigation conducted by the New York State Attorney General's office into allegations that police officers stopped female motorists and sexually abused and harassed them.
When California State Attorney General Bill Lockyer spoke about Wallkill which was breathing down Riverside's neck to become the first department to be placed under a state consent decree, he called it a case of "Driving While Blond" but for the women involved, it was no joke as it isn't for women who have shared their experiences.
It was no joke for the newspaper that reported on the sexual harassment of female motorists by Wallkill Police Department and faced retaliation in response.
Here are the allegations made against Wallkill's police department by the state attorney general's office.
(excerpt)
Among the illegal actions alleged in the 54-page complaint are the following:
Police officers stopped female motorists – often at night and on lightly traveled roads – to solicit dates or sexual favors. At times the uniformed officers would make sexually suggestive comments or implied that falsified charges could be dropped if the women would agree to go out on dates with them.
Police officers harassed women at their places of employment and elsewhere. In one instance, a uniformed male police officer forced a woman to partially disrobe, and subsequently interrogated her about her sexual past, when there was no valid law enforcement reason for either action. In another instance, a uniformed officer repeatedly visited a local dining establishment where he grabbed several 16-year old waitresses around the waist and hips or putt his hand on their thighs. The officer also repeatedly made sexually suggestive comments, for example, asking what the waitresses would look like if they took their shirts off. Although parents complained to the Town about this officer, no disciplinary action was ever taken.
Police officers harassed Wallkill citizens who questioned or spoke out about police conduct.police conduct.
Police officers ticketed Middletown Times Herald Record delivery trucks in a coordinated effort to retaliate against the newspaper for news articles critical of the department.
In 2002, the department had greatly improved its assigned monitor told the New York Times.
(excerpt)
''I think it is a department in transition and moving in the right direction,'' Mr. Esserman said yesterday in a phone interview from his office at Thacher Associates, a private investigative and monitoring firm in New York City.
The 37-page report noted that the Police Department had installed video cameras in patrol cars, but officers sometimes failed to turn on the cameras or the microphones. It also said that officers often did not record all required information when stopping drivers, and were known to turn in ''sloppy paperwork'' with the wrong dates and patrol car numbers, among other things.
Still, the report acknowledged that there had been no more ''ugly allegations'' of misconduct and that the Police Department had forged better relationships with other law enforcement agencies. The report said: ''The complaints from other local law enforcement agencies about the lack of professionalism and cooperation by Wallkill have abated. One has the sense that the Wallkill P.D. hit bottom and in the last seven months has begun the upward climb.''
Asst. State Attorney General Mark Peters was cautiously optimistic, said the department was no longer a threat to public safety but had this to say.
(excerpt)
''At the same time the attorney general's office is pleased that the immediate danger has been dealt with, we take very seriously the failure to follow all the oversights, such as video cameras and stop forms, because they are what prevent a department from slipping back again,'' he said.
In 2006, Wallkill completed its decree, hopefully a much better department including in terms of how it treats women.
Driving While Female and sexually abused
Wallkill's police department wasn't the only small law enforcement agency in New York state that employed officers who harassed female motorists.
In Suffolk County, Highway Patrol officer Frank Wright was sentenced to serve five years in prison in a courtroom in Central Islip after he was convicted of sexually abusing four women including one who was forced to strip down to their underwear and then walk in 38 degree weather while holding her clothing.
And in Nassau County, a police officer was charged with forcing a woman to have oral sex with him, according to this New York Times article.
(excerpt)
The allegations have led to investigations by local police forces and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, two grand jury proceedings, a lawsuit by the state and a change in Nassau police policy. In several cases, including this latest one, news reports about the women's complaints have prompted others to come forward, sometimes about incidents that took place months or years earlier.
''Often when people come forward, they discover that things are more widespread, and it means other people come forward with other types of stories, more readily,'' said Nancy Duff Campbell, co-president of the National Women's Law Center in Washington, which has been following the New York cases. ''This is exactly the kind of thing people wouldn't like to come forward with, but there is strength in numbers.''
Officer Murphy, 36, was arrested Thursday night at the Eighth Precinct station house in Levittown. The police said that after a witness came forward with information this week -- prompted by other recent allegations of assaults by police officers -- they interviewed a woman who said that in December 1999, Officer Murphy ordered her to follow his police cruiser in her car to a wooded area in West Farmingdale, where he sodomized her.
Officer Murphy is also under investigation by the Nassau Police Department's Internal Affairs Unit about a woman's claim of a similar assault last August, when, she says, she was forced to perform oral sex on a plainclothes officer in exchange for her release after a drunk-driving stop, the police said. Although the department would not call Officer Murphy a suspect in that case, it placed him on administrative assignment this week. It is also investigating why the woman's complaint was not looked into immediately by the Internal Affairs Unit but instead languished for five months.
Driving While Female and miscarrying
In Kansas City earlier this year, Sofia Salva miscarried after she was arrested and thrown in jail. She's shown on video pleading with the two officers, who were later suspended, to take her to the hospital because she's bleeding.
(excerpt)
The suspensions came two days after police released a videotape showing Sofia Salva telling officers during her arrest last year that she was three months pregnant, bleeding and needed to go to a hospital. The tape shows officers ignoring her pleas.
After the ninth request, the tape shows, a female officer asked: "How is that my problem?"
The officers' behavior is "inconsistent with the values and policies of this department and inconsistent with the training they received in the police academy," Chief James Corwin said at a news conference Thursday.
Driving While Female and murdered
Then there was Cara Knott, the young woman who was strangled to death by a California Highway Patrol officer during a traffic stop in Craig Peyer was convicted of the murder and had before his arrest, been chosen to provide televised safety tips for women after Knott's murder. Recently, Peyer declined the requests of a prosecutor to submit a sample of DNA to be tested against evidence.
Studies have been conducted by researchers examining the "Driving While Female" behavior shown at law enforcement agencies and whether it's truly a case of "rogue" officers or "bad apples" or a systemic problem. It's probably a combination of both. Every law enforcement agency had officers who feel it's their right to abuse their power and public trust to commit misconduct including criminal conduct against women. But it's how an agency handles it or doesn't handle it that determines the systemic nature of the problem and many agencies have practices that encourage these officers to flourish even as they are committing serious misconduct including crimes on the job or even off of it.
Dr. Samuel Walker and Dawn Irlbeck, from the University of Nebraska, Omaha drafted an amazing research paper called Driving While Female: A National Problem in Police Misconduct
An Indianapolis Police Department officer for example had his statistics for his traffic stops broken down by gender and it was discovered that 89% of the motorists he stopped were female. Not surprisingly, he wound up getting into serious trouble for misconduct against women and is no longer in law enforcement.
The study done by Walker and Irlbeck discusses strategies for addressing problems in police departments that involve crimes and other serious misconduct committed by women by their officers. One of the most pressing issues, the study stated, was addressing what it called the sexist culture that exists in most law enforcement agencies. Signs of a sexist police culture include the following.
(excerpt)
(1) employment discrimination against women, including the failure to promote women to supervisory positions;[14]
(2) tolerance of sexual harassment within the department;[15]
(3) a systematic failure to investigate domestic violence incidents where the alleged perpetrator is an officer in the department;[16]
(4) inadequate policies regarding pregnancy and parental leave.[17]
Because police departments in general tend to have isolated, insulated cultures, it's hard for people on the outside of them to know how they fare when it comes to identifying a sexist culture, let alone addressing one.
Recommendations from the study were to collect statistics involving race and gender of motorists pulled over on traffic stops. One clue to look for in these stops is to see whether or not the officers disproportionately stop women, given that women are much less likely to be stopped by a police officer than men are.
An Indianapolis Police Department officer for example had his statistics for his traffic stops broken down by gender and it was discovered that 89% of the motorists he stopped were female. Not surprisingly, he wound up getting into serious trouble for misconduct against women and is no longer in law enforcement.
Also having adequate supervision of police officers while they are working in the field. Having a complaint system in place that is implemented properly and increasing the number of female officers through all the ranks in a police agency, because women are at much lower risk of this type of behavior than their male counterparts.
Tracking complaints is also useful. An agency can ask itself this. Do you have an officer or officers who's primarily getting complaints filed by women, for different allegations? How are these investigations conducted and do the complaints keep coming in from different women even if an officer is exonerated? Do you have officers who tell sexist or sexual jokes or engage in such banter out in the field? To other officers, male and/or female? To women out in the field that they encounter? If a supervising sergeant is out in the field and witnesses this banter, how does he or she respond? Does he or she respond?
How does the agency handle sexual discrimination and sexual harassment complaints filed by its employees? Does it investigate them as thoroughly as it recites those policies so quickly on request? Does it instead ignore, retaliate, terminate, or blackball those female officers when they try to get employed elsewhere. Does it tell the women who complain how unhappy it is that they did complain?
Do the racial discrimination and harassment policies have teeth? Are the sexual discrimination and harassment policies enforced? Are they simply pieces of paper with writing on them? Are those who harass women in law enforcement and in the field seen as the problems or are the women who complain seen as the problems? Does an agency educate its employees on filing complaints of harassment and then turn around and punish them when they do? Does an agency educate the public on how to file complaints of harassment and then punish them when they do?
To the officers, who witness misconduct by other officers, one could ask this. Do you tell the officer to knock it off and why? Do you report it to a supervisor? Do you stand there in silence and do nothing? Do you participate? Are you one of those problem officers?
Training officers, the ambassadors to the department's culture, do you train your officers not to engage in this conduct through your own example? Do you educate your officers on the harassment policies? Do you accept their complaints and not treat them badly for doing so? Are you the problem officer?
To supervisors, if an officer in their rank is making sexual or sexist comments, what do you do? Do you tell that officer to knock it off and why? Do you report that officer to their supervisor? Do you sit there and do nothing? Do you engage in it? Are you the problem?
To the management, do you mandate and promote an environment that discourages racism and sexism on your watch? Do you create and implement policies in this area which actually have teeth to them? Do you encourage people to use the policies or do you punish them after the fact? Do you engage in this bad behavior or do nothing? Are you the problem?
These are some questions from which to start.
But members of the public have to step up and report the conduct too, and though I didn't back then, I would certainly do so now if the complainant was willing to do so. The problem is when filing a complaint on someone else's behalf as a witness is that you don't know what will happen to that person as a result. Will they be fairly treated or will they be punished?
For a civilian witness, it's not the same thing because if officers report this conduct, their word is given greater credence by investigators and taken much more seriously. That greater credence given to officers is shown by the much higher rate of sustaining investigations generated inhouse than those by complainants. It's very difficult listening to complaints of misconduct for example and trying to respect people's wishes to not file complaints due to fear for their safety or that of their families. It's sad that the only prayer that women who are victimized by police officers often have is that a brave officer will do his job and report that officer, thus putting a bit of a dent in the code of silence philosophy that still pervades most law enforcement agencies.
Both have happened to women who do file these complaints in terms of being treated fairly or being treated badly.
One obvious problem is that many women are too embarrassed or too fearful to report sexual misconduct whether it's a joke that makes them uncomfortable or worse so a lot of this conduct probably goes unreported. They fear retaliation if they do come forward or having to deal with an agency that often looks at them as less than human and backs its own. So what often happens is that these officers who engage in this misconduct like Van Rossum do so for years, before they finally get caught.
But not always.
One woman who alleged that she was raped by a police officer working for an Orange County agency reported the crime while being contacted for a customer satisfaction survey for another law enforcement agency. When the person conducting the survey heard her story, an investigation was initiated by the involved agency and criminal charges were filed against an officer
Sista II Sista is planning several strategies to address police misconduct against women of color at meetings it's been holding.
(excerpt)
Isabel Gonzalez spoke next, emphasizing that the "solution to violence against women does not lie with the cops." She said, "In our experiences, the police sexually harass women in the community and women get harassed by the cops [when they are victims of] domestic violence because of the patriarchal structure of the police department." She added that "the cops can't protect girls from harassment by other boys," when they are doing the harassment themselves.
She said they have been working on alternatives to fighting violence against women without involving the police department. They have also been working on a campaign to publicize police sexual harassment of women: in a program they call "CopWatch," in which they will videotape incidents of police harassment of girls in the 831 precinct and then take the videotape to the precinct headquarters to show it to police. They will also hold a press conference to show the videotape to the media and hope to display the video in other places around the community.
More on the issues of gender and policing to come in this continuing series on these issues.
Riverside's city government will be holding public meetings at various occasions to receive input on how the latest round of Community Development Block Grant funds should be spent. They've been handling it through this system since the city council voted to dissolve the community organizations which oversaw the dispersion of funds in their CDBG zones.
The decision of scheduling judge, Gary Tranbarger of the Riverside County Superior Court to dismiss several misdemeanor cases due to a lack of courtrooms to hear them was upheld during its appeal, according to the Press Enterprise.
(excerpt)
The judicial panel's decision sided with Tranbarger and Riverside County court administrators, saying the absence of precise language in Penal Code 1050a about civil courts means the courts can use discretion in applying it.
"The trial court is permitted to consider the circumstances of each case in exercising its discretion in determining whether to give a particular criminal case precedence over a particular civil action or proceeding," the decision said.
"I can't comment on a pending case, but we will continue to comply with all orders of the court." Fields, the presiding judge, said Monday.
The ruling will not make a change in how cases currently facing dismissal are argued, said Assistant Public Defender Bryant Villagran.
"This gives guidance to parties as to what the appellate position might be, but it doesn't get rid of the problem," Villagran said. "So each side will continue to assert their position until it plays out at the appellate level."
In Orange County, the sheriff there, Michael Corona has been indicted by a federal grand jury
The blog, Inside Riverside more than hinted about these latest developments in that episode.
Labels: City elections, CPRC vs the city, public forums in all places, racism costs, sexism costs
posted by Five Before Midnight | 3:29 PM
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