Police Sexual Misconduct

Police Sexual Misconduct, sometimes referred to as Police Sexual Violence is conduct by law enforcement officers that violates laws on sexual offending. It may or may not involve abuse of office, or abuse of privileges of office.^[1]

In many cases, around 1/3rd, a child or minor is involved.^[2] Alarmingly, while marginally over 1% of child sex offenders in the general population get non-custodial (probation) sentences, 40% of police officers convicted of similar offenses do.^[3] Given 0.3% of the US population are themselves officers, and officers bias male-adult (the on-risk demographic for CSO), there is a strong probability that a sizeable minority of child sex offenders achieving non-custodial are in fact officers.

Child offending "epidemic"

In the 2010s and 2020s, the digitization of News Media allowed for the public recognition of multiple child sexual offences linked to Law Enforcement Officers, particularly in the US, UK, Canada and Australia.^[4]^[5]^[6]^[7] In the same period, social media personalities, particularly those associated with the left-wing political tendency, began to document these cases in ways that became increasingly systematic. In some cases, critics have sought to expose racial and gender injustices in law enforcement as well as what they see as the sexual predation of children, stigmatization of sex workers and female drivers by LEOs.^[8] When combined with disconcerting facts about intelligence agents (i.e. the tendency for federal child pornographers not to face prosecution when material is found on official storage media^[9]), Police Sexual Misconduct has the potential to act as a radicalizing agent for anti-police sentiment.

It is true that modern news media has exposed multiple examples of child sexual offending by Law Enforcement Officers, as many such examples appear every week in news aggregation services such as Google News. However, there is less data on the frequency of sexual offending among Law Enforcement Officers vs. the general population, as sorted by age and gender. Kenneth Lanning has suggested there is a tendency for sexual offenders to gravitate towards positions of authority.^[10] The Daily Mail published data from a Child Porn bust, which showed, astoundingly, that 1 in 26 of those arrested was serving as a police officer.^[11]

2024 WaPo Investigation

See archives of WaPo

In 2024, the Washington Post published the results of a 2-year investigation, revealing that at least 1.8k officers were arrested for child sex crime in a period of just over a decade. In many cases, the system introduced delays and did the bidding of corrupt officers. Almost half of the officers found guilty achieved non-custodial sentences.^[12]

Wikipedia

Wikipedia, which has between 70 and 100+ articles on weapons manufacturer Raytheon and its various products^[13] has disappointed some with its almost complete failure to address Police Sexual Misconduct. For example, Category:Child sexual abuse in law enforcement and Category:Sexual abuse in law enforcement contain very few US law enforcement officials, documenting mainly murderers and foreign criminals. This follows the tendency of Wikipedia to portray police corruption and abuses of power as a mainly violent and non-western phenomenon.

At the time of writing, there are no overview Wikipedia articles dedicated to the above topics.

External links

The Henry A. Wallace Police Crime Database

References

[1] Police paedophiles: More than 30 guilty since January 2022

[2] Reason: Victims Were Kids for One-Third of U.S. Police Officers Who Lost Badges for Sexual Misconduct

[3] Slate: The Quiet Epidemic of Predators in Uniforms

[4] Corrections Officer Who Called for Killing Pedophiles Arrested on Child Porn Charges

[5] Case of Alan Hawley

[6] Case of Stanley Burkhardt

[7] Case of Lee Kelly

[8] The Situational Context of Police Sexual Violence: Data and Policy Implications

[9] See, e.g. Buzzfeed, and nextgov.

[10] Kenneth Lanning testimony from 12.30

[11] Story from the Daily Mail

[12] Shielded by the Badge? Investigation Finds Hundreds of Cops May Have Sexually Exploited Kids — But Avoided Prison Time, IRW overview of project

[13] See Infobox for Raytheon and related topics

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