WASHINGTON (DC)
Washington Post
December 19, 2024
By Jessica Contrera, Jenn Abelson and John D. Harden
The Post spent two years reporting on kids exploited by police officers. Here’s what we learned about the systemic failures that allow these crimes to occur.
- Predatory police officers are using their positions to find, groom and abuse children.
- Law enforcement agencies are failing to take steps to protect kids and prevent additional crimes.
- Departments are enabling predators by botching background checks.
- School police have immense access to kids, but without the same guardrails as educators.
- Police agencies are minimizing reports of child sexual misconduct by their officers and mishandling investigations.
- Even when officers are convicted of crimes involving child sexual abuse, nearly 40 percent avoid prison.
- These crimes forever change kids and damage communities’ trust in law enforcement.
- What steps can be taken to prevent these crimes?
At least 1,800 officers. When Washington Post reporters set out to track down how often law enforcement officers were being arrested for crimes involving child sexual abuse, we never expected to end up with a number so high. Our investigation found that at least 1,800 officers were charged with these crimes from 2005 through 2022.
Of the hundreds of thousands of sworn officers in the United States, only a fraction are ever arrested for any offense. But we discovered that, on average, a law enforcement officer has been charged with a crime involving child sexual abuse twice a week, every week, for 18 years.
We stopped counting at the end of 2022 when we started reporting our series, Abused by the Badge. Nearly every week since, our inboxes have pinged with alerts of new cases. The circumstances are disturbingly familiar.
Americans have reckoned with sexual misconduct committed by teachers, clergy, coaches and others who work with children. Abusive law enforcement officers, too, can gain the trust of parents and guardians, create opportunities to get kids alone and threaten repercussions for broken silence. Unlike other professions, they do it while wielding the added power of their badges and guns.
After two years of reporting on children being violated by the officers sworn to protect them, here is what we’ve learned about the systemic failures that allow these crimes to keep happening.
Predatory police officers are using their positions to find, groom and abuse children.
In cases across the country, abusive officers regularly met their victims through their work. Some were assigned to youth-focused jobs, like at schools or in cadet programs. But many officers found kids while responding to calls for help or investigating crimes.
Through an exclusive analysis of the nation’s most comprehensive database of police arrests, which is managed by Bowling Green State University, we found that nearly all of the officers charged with crimes involving child sexual abuse were men. They worked in departments of all sizes and in every state. Some even held leadership positions; 47 of those charged were chiefs, sheriffs or heads of their agencies. Though the specific names of charges can vary, the majority of officers were accused of crimes involving the direct abuse of children, including rape and forcible fondling. The kids most frequently targeted were teenage girls.
Law enforcement agencies are failing to take steps to protect kids and prevent additional crimes.
Some police officials, prosecutors and judges we spoke with admitted that they could have done more to hold officers accountable in the cases they handled. But nationwide, child sexual abuse by law enforcement has gone largely unrecognized by the public and unaddressed within the criminal justice system. There is no national tracking system for officers accused of preying on kids. There is no requirement to train police on how to spot signs of grooming in their colleagues’ behavior. There is no universal mandate to screen for potential perpetrators. Police unions and professional organizations have not dedicatedresources and attention to large-scale prevention efforts.
Most law enforcement agencies don’t have clear rules about when officers can be alone with or privately message minors. Abusive cops used those loopholes to repeatedly meet with and have inappropriate conversations with children, without violating policies. Predatory officers are also taking advantage of a lack of supervision, including some who repeatedly visited minors’ homes while on duty. In Iowa, an officer assaulted a 15-year-old girl in an empty police station and choked her until she passed out. In Indiana, an officer sent hundreds of messages from his work laptop to a teen he was abusing in his police cruiser. Both of these convicted officers told The Post that if they had been more closely supervised, they might have been stopped.
Departments are enabling predators by botching background checks.
We found that some of the officers who preyed on kids were hired despite having previously been accused, arrested or sometimes even convicted of child abuse, domestic violence and other serious crimes. Other cops were accused of exploiting kids at previous police jobs — but avoided serious consequences and then got hired at other departments.
One Texas officer, Kevin Coffey, racked up multiple misconduct complaints while working at eight law enforcement agencies over 11 years. One of his former supervisors, who said he fired Coffey for harassing a teenage girl, tried to warn other departments — but the officer kept being handed a gun and a badge. Coffey eventually got promoted to chief in Maypearl, where he was convicted ofsexually abusinga 14-year-old girl in his office.
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School police have immense access to kids, but without the same guardrails as educators.
The Post identified more than 200 elementary, middle and high school police officers who were charged with crimes involving child sexual abuse from 2005 through 2022. In dozens of cases, arrested school officers were accused of violating children on school grounds, including in their offices. One of those officers, Richland County Sheriff’s Deputy Jamel Bradley, kept his job in Columbia, South Carolina, despite multiple complaints about his behavior, including a 15-year-old’s report that he sexually assaulted her in his office during school. He eventually pleaded guilty to sexually abusing two other students.
The Justice Department, which has directed hundreds of millions of dollars for school police programs, had never issued guidance to agencies and schools on how to prevent sexual misconduct by school police. But after our investigation was published, the department issued new federal guidelines urging law enforcement agencies to train school police on boundaries with children, ensure there are “multiple ways” for students to report troubling behavior and fully investigate complaints of sexual assault and misconduct by officers.
Police agencies are minimizing reports of child sexual misconduct by their officers and mishandling investigations.
How do you report the police to the police? This was the conundrum faced by so many families we spoke with. They feared not being believed or being retaliated against. In dozens of cases we identified, officers reportedly intimidated victims and witnesses, destroyed evidence or used their connections to try to derail criminal proceedings. Some victims found their complaints were immediately taken seriously, particularly when the investigation was handled by authorities other than the alleged abuser’s employer, such as state or federal law enforcement agencies. But too often, reports of abuse were downplayed or ignored. Officers suspected of exploiting children were left on the job. Then, kids were abused again.
In New Orleans, The Post found that the highest-ranking New Orleans police official, then-Superintendent Shaun Ferguson, was texted about “potential sexual abuse of a minor by an officer.” Five days later, Officer Rodney Vicknair locked a 15-year-old girl in his truck and sexually assaulted her. Our reporting prompted a federal judge to restore a key part of the victim’s civil lawsuit that accused the city of failing to quickly take action once it received notice of the suspected abuse. In August, the city was ordered to pay her $1 million.
Even when officers are convicted of crimes involving child sexual abuse, nearly 40 percent avoid prison.
The Indiana officer who was accused ofsexually abusing a 16-year-old in his patrol car? He pleaded guilty and got probation. A Missouri cop who was accused ofsexually abusing a 16-year-old girl at a police shooting range? He pleaded guiltyand got probation.
Nearly 40 percent of convicted officers identified by The Post avoided prison sentences. In cases across the country, prosecutors offered generous plea deals to cops who admitted to raping, groping and exploiting minors, citing the need to bring cases to a close or spare victims from testifying. Sometimes they did so despite the objections of victims and their families. Then, judges approved those agreements — or made sentencing determinations of their own — that allowed abusive officers to walk out of courtrooms without any prison time. In South Carolina, prosecutors had offered the school resource officer a plea deal that kept him out of prison and off the sex offender registryin exchange for pleading guilty to sexually abusing two students. But after our investigation revealed years of misconduct complaints, a judge ordered the former deputy to register as a sex offender.
We also found police departments have repeatedlyfailed to report cops convicted of crimes to state licensing agencies to prevent them from being an officer again. Only after we wrote about the Indiana officer who received probation for sexually abusing a teenager in his patrol car did the Indiana Law Enforcement Academy revoke that officer’s certification.
These crimes forever change kids and damage communities’ trust in law enforcement.
Nightmares. Flashbacks. Fear of patrol cars. Children who are sexually abused by police sworn to protect them face lifelong consequences. We learned many of these kids had already survived trauma growing up — experiences that sometimesmade them easier targets for predatory cops. Others had joined youth police organizations or welcomed mentoring from officers because they hoped to one day work in law enforcement. Now, their futures have been upended. Our reporting showed that the kids violated aren’t the only ones with lasting harm. Especially in small towns, where cops are deeply embedded in the communities they serve, the ripple effects of these violations are immense. As Chuck Wexler, who leads the Police Executive Research Forum, told us: “Whatever we can do to prevent this and hold those accountable will help restore the trust in the police.”
What steps can be taken to prevent these crimes?
After two years of reporting, we know that there is still much to uncover about this entrenched problem. Sex crimes are widely believed to be underreported, and the roughly 1,800 cases we studied only included those in which the investigation ended in arrest and the arrestwas reported in the media or court documents. Philip Stinson, a criminologist and former police officer who created the Bowling Green State University database of officer arrests, argues that for this type of misconduct to be addressed, those in law enforcement and the communities they serve must first acknowledge these crimes are often the result of systemic failures, not just individual bad actors.
Many institutions that can be exploited by predators — including schools, churches and youth programs — have come to treat child sexual abuse as an always-present risk. They prioritize prevention efforts recommended by experts, such as assessing job applicants specifically for their risk to abuse children. They limit one-on-one interactions between minors and adults, mandate training on red-flag behaviors and enforce explicit policies about appropriate boundaries. Similar efforts are overdue in law enforcement, said Strategies for Youth Executive Director Lisa Thurau, whose organization focuses on police interactions with juveniles. Thurau told us, “Until you have leaders saying, ‘This is unacceptable, nonnegotiable, you will be on my list for firing and you will be sent to court’ — until you have that, you are going to continue to see this behavior.”
Resources for victims of sexual abuse
RAINN, an anti-sexual violence organization, operates a 24-hour National Sexual Assault Hotline by phone at 800-656-4673 and online at hotline.rainn.org.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children operates a 24-hour call center for reporting suspected child sexual exploitation by phone at 1-800-843-5678 and online at cybertipline.org.
These organizations work in partnership with local service providers as well as with law enforcement agencies across the country.
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To learn more about the Abused by the Badge series, how we reported these stories and the team behind this work, read our methodology. This investigative journalism would not be possible without subscribers. You can subscribe to The Post here.