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 |  Subject: Sexual predators on the police force is not a problem to be minimized  Thu Aug 29, 2019 1:22 am | |
| As you probably would guess, allegations of excessive force comprise the majority of complaints lodged against American police officers. What you might not know is that allegations of sexual impropriety come in second. It’s disturbingly common for officers to be accused of sexual crimes – sometimes against people in their custody.
Two big stories in Cleveland last week and another one this week are emblematic of a national policing problem that has received far less attention than needless brutality and wrongful killings. It’s a different kind of abuse of power, one likely to leave victims with more scars inside than out.
Last week, former Sgt. Michael Rybarczyk, who’d been on the Cleveland police force 29 years, was sentenced to 10 days in jail for soliciting prostitutes while on duty. And, in a far more disturbing case, Solomon Nhiwatiwa, a five-year veteran on the force, was charged Wednesday with attempted kidnapping, pandering obscenity, disseminating material harmful to juveniles, assault, endangering children, child enticement, interfering with custody and public indecency.
On Tuesday, Mario Lozada, a 26-year police veteran, was sentenced to eight years in prison after pleading guilty in July to unlawful sexual conduct with a minor, child pornography, promoting prostitution and other charges.
Authorities say Nhiwatiwa saw a 12-year-old girl waiting for her school bus in Euclid and after he unsuccessfully trying to entice the child into his car, he used his cell phone camera to record himself urinating on her.
Rybarczyk surrendered his Ohio Peace Officer Training Academy license when he pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor counts of unauthorized use of a police database. Authorities say Lozada retired from the force in November when he was found in an SUV with a teeenage girl and booked on a charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Michael O’Malley said Nhiwatiwa “will be held accountable. It’s my office’s mission to ensure he never wears the badge of a police officer again.”
Nobody who does what Nhiwatiwa is accused of doing ever should.
Experts on the prevalence of police sexual misconduct have complained that many of our country’s law enforcement agencies don’t have written polices warning their officers not to engage in sexual activity with people they might encounter while they’re on duty.
In a January 2017 article in the academic journal “Women and Criminal Justice,” Andrea J. Ritchie and Delores Jones-Brown published “Policing Race, Gender, and Sex: A Review of Law Enforcement Policies.” The researchers looked at 36 police departments across the United States and found that “Although departments generally had a policy explicitly prohibiting sexual harassment and misconduct among employees, more than half had no policy explicitly prohibiting police sexual misconduct against members of the public.”
Fortunately, the Cleveland police department has a policy that spells out that “engaging in sexual activities while on duty” is a Group III violation, the most serious kind.
That’s certainly the right category, but it’s important to say that not all sexual misconduct involves sex or sex on duty. Misconduct includes officers pulling over cars to ask out the driver or passenger or, as Rybarczyk did: using a police database to look up information about women he was pursuing. Between June 1, 2018 and Jan. 31, he also used social media to send messages to 2,300 women -- while he was on duty and getting paid to work.
Rybarcyzk surrendered his license; Lozado retired and, as noted above, O’Malley says he’s going to make sure Nhiwatiwa never wears a badge again. But it isn’t always the case that predatory officers have their careers terminated. Some are allowed to quietly resign and move on to other police departments. It’s important that police chiefs everywhere take a hard line against those evasive maneuvers. They should always refer predators in their ranks and do whatever they can to thwart any of their plans to keep working as police.
In 2010, The Cato Institue, a libertarian think tank, reported that complaints of sexual misconduct are exceeded only by complaints of brutality. Then, in 2015 the Associated Press published the results of a year-long investigation into sexual misconduct by U.S. law enforcement that “uncovered about 1,000 officers who lost their badges in a six-year period for rape, sodomy and other sexual assault; sex crimes that included possession of child pornography; or sexual misconduct such as propositioning citizens or having consensual but prohibited on-duty intercourse.”
Nobody believes that was a full accounting of the problem -- because the investigation counted up police officers who’d been stripped of their law-enforcement licenses for sexual misconduct, and there are states that don’t have a process to decertify disgraced police.
Police who double as sexual predators tend to prey on folks the public will struggle to believe. For his victims, Lozada picked girls who were already battling drug addictions. Rybarczyk pursued prostitutes. Nhiwatiwa, police reports say, chose a child he spotted alone at the bus stop.
While there are only three police officers mentioned above – and only two who’ve been found guilty – and there are more than 1650 officers on the force, we shouldn’t be complacent. Every department might not have a lot of predators, but every department probably has, has had or will have one.
At the end of their investigation, the AP mentioned a 2007 convention attended by more than 70 chiefs of police. When they were asked who’d had to deal with at least one officer accused of sexual misconduct, “nearly every attendee raised a hand.”
https://www.cleveland.com/opinion/2019/08/sexual-predators-on-the-police-force-is-not-a-problem-to-be-minimized.html |
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