CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: Even some poLICE chiefs admitted that officers abusing their authority to sexually harass and assault people is widespread  Sat Jun 13, 2020 3:49 am | |
| Cops Don't Care About Violence Against Women
 
In 2018, several women in central Texas filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of “all women” against Austin’s police chief Brian Manley, as well as the Travis County sheriff and the city’s district attorney. The lawsuit alleged that the Austin Police Department had badly mishandled rape cases.
Marina Conner, one of the plaintiffs in the case, had been raped in a parking lot in 2015, leaving her bruised and bloodied. During the attack, the University of Texas student tried to call a friend for help. Unable to reach her friend, Conner left a voicemail that included her cries begging her rapist stop. “I had a black eye and a gash on my forehead from when my head was slammed against the wall; I had bruises on the back of my arms and legs from when he pinned me against the wall; my vaginal and anal cavities were torn up to where no one could argue that was consensual in any way,” Conner recounted in an interview. But her attacker claimed it was consensual, and the police agreed, closing her case using a method known as “exceptional clearance,” a designation that allows officers to claim cases have been solved even when no arrests have been made. A recent ProPublica investigation found that exceptional clearance is used frequently by police departments to make it seem as if they solve more rape cases than they actually do.
“It was hard,” Conner added, “to understand how all of that was not enough.”
The issue isn’t limited to Austin. In cities around the country, women filed similar lawsuits in recent years, which collectively painted a damning pattern and picture of law enforcement agencies willfully refusing to investigate sexual assaults. Most people who are raped do not report their crimes to the police, and the stories told in these lawsuits offer some obvious reasons why: There is an overwhelming body of evidence that not only clearly demonstrates how poorly police departments around the country handle and investigate sexual assaults and rapes, but that officers regularly wield their authority to commit sexual assault.
The story of Daniel Holtzclaw, the former Oklahoma City police officer who in 2015 was convicted of assaulting and raping 13 black women, is fairly notorious, but he’s merely the most egregious example of a pattern of police officers abusing their power in this context. A 2015 investigation by the Associated Press found that during a six-year period, about 1,000 officers in law enforcement agencies around the country had had their badges revoked due to sexual assault or other forms of sexual misconduct. That number, the AP reported, is “unquestionably an undercount” of the widespread nature of the problem, due in part to victims’ unwillingness to report police officers to the very department that employs them.
But these numbers are often ignored as calls to defund the police and redirect at least a portion of police departments’ bloated budgets towards social welfare programs gain momentum. Some defenders of police departments cling to the argument, contrary to all evidence, that one of their necessary functions is to investigate cases of violence against women, cases that for decades they have shown they simply do not care about—a disregard that they apply broadly to women of all races but in particular black and brown women. “Who do we call if there’s an emergency situation? What about domestic violence? What about child abuse, what about murder and rape?” Fox News host Ainsley Earhardt mused recently. “Defunding the police would be great for robbers and rapists,” Republican Senator Bill Cassidy said similarly in a separate Fox segment, a statement that earned him an approving tweet from Donald Trump.
“But what about rapists?” is, as the prison abolitionist and activist Mariame Kaba said in a 2017 interview, “the question that always gets thrown at anybody who identifies as abolitionist.” The question isn’t just posed as a bad-faith response by conservatives eager to defend the police, but by feminists who have embraced what the sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein termed “carceral feminism”—punitive policing, criminalization, and incarceration—as the solution to problems of violence against women. But as Kaba pointed out, “The vast majority of rapists never see the inside of a courtroom, let alone get convicted and end up in prison.” She continued: “So the system you feel so attached to and that you seem invested in preserving is not delivering what you say you want, which is presumably safety and an end to violence. Worse than that it is causing inordinate additional harm. The logics of policing and prisons are not actually addressing the systemic causes and roots of violence.” As the researcher and activist Andrea Ritchie put it to me, “They’re not actually doing what their public relations say they’re doing about sexual assault.” Ritchie continued: “And they’re certainly not preventing it.”
More: https://jezebel.com/cops-dont-care-about-violence-against-women-1843908761
 
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Anarcho-Capitalist, AnCaps Forum, Ancapolis, OZschwitz Contraband
“The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.”-- Max Stirner
"Remember: Evil exists because good men don't kill the government officials committing it." -- Kurt Hofmann |
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