Research suggests that family violence is two to four times higher in the law-enforcement community than in the general population. So where’s the public outrage?
Should the National Football League suspend or ban any player caught assaulting a wife or girlfriend? That seems to be the conventional wisdom since video emerged of running back Ray Rice knocking his wife unconscious in an elevator, even as reports surface that many more NFL players have domestic-abuse records.
While I have no particular objection to a suspension of any length for such players, the public focus on NFL policy seems strange and misplaced to me. Despite my general preference for reducing the prison population, an extremely strong person rendering a much smaller, weaker person unconscious with his fists, as Rice did, is a situation where prison is particularly appropriate. More generally, clear evidence of domestic abuse is something that ought to result in legal sanction. Employers aren’t a good stand in for prosecutors, juries, and judges.
Should ex-convicts who abused their partners be denied employment forever? I think not. Our notion should be that they’ve paid their debt to society in prison. Pressure on the NFL to take a harder line against domestic abuse comes in the context of a society where the crime isn’t adequately punished, so I totally understand it. Observing anti-NFL rhetoric, you’d nevertheless get the impression that other employers monitor and sanction domestic abuse incidents by employees. While I have nothing against pressuring the NFL to go beyond what the typical employer does, I fear that vilifying the league has the effect of misleading the public into a belief that it is out of step with general norms on this issue. Domestic violence is less common among NFL players than the general population.
And there is another American profession that has a significantly more alarming problem with domestic abuse. I’d urge everyone who believes in zero tolerance for NFL employees caught beating their wives or girlfriends to direct as much attention—or ideally, even more attention—at police officers who assault their partners. Several studies have found that the romantic partners of police officers suffer domestic abuse at rates significantly higher than the general population. And while all partner abuse is unacceptable, it is especially problematic when domestic abusers are literally the people that battered and abused women are supposed to call for help.
If there’s any job that domestic abuse should disqualify a person from holding, isn’t it the one job that gives you a lethal weapon, trains you to stalk people without their noticing, and relies on your judgment and discretion to protect the abused against domestic abusers?
The opprobrium heaped on the NFL for failing to suspend or terminate domestic abusers, and the virtual absence of similar pressure directed at police departments, leads me to believe that many people don’t know the extent of domestic abuse among officers. This is somewhat surprising, since a country shocked by Ray Rice’s actions ought to be even more horrified by the most egregious examples of domestic abuse among police officers. Their stories end in death.
There’s the recently retired 30-year veteran police officer who shot his wife and then himself in Colorado Springs earlier this summer. There’s Tacoma Police Chief David Brame, who perpetrated another murder-suicide in April. (Update: it’s in fact the tenth anniversary of this crime, which I missed in the ABC story.) Also in April, an Indiana news station reported on “Sgt. Ryan Anders, a narcotics officer,” who “broke into his ex-wife’s home and fatally shot her. He then turned the gun on himself.” In February, “Dallas police confirmed … that a Crandall police officer shot and killed his wife before killing himself.” Last year, a Nevada police officer killed his wife, his son, and then himself. And Joshua Boren, a Utah police officer, “killed his wife, their two children, his mother-in-law and then himself” after receiving “text messages … hours earlier threatening to leave him and take their kids and confronting him for raping her.” That isn’t an exhaustive survey, just a quick roundup of recent stories gleaned from the first couple pages of Google results. And statistics about “blue” domestic abuse are shocking in their own way.
As the National Center for Women and Policing noted in a heavily footnoted information sheet, “Two studies have found that at least 40 percent of police officer families experience domestic violence, in contrast to 10 percent of families in the general population. A third study of older and more experienced officers found a rate of 24 percent, indicating that domestic violence is two to four times more common among police families than American families in general.” Cops “typically handle cases of police family violence informally, often without an official report, investigation, or even check of the victim’s safety,” the summary continues. “This ‘informal’ method is often in direct contradiction to legislative mandates and departmental policies regarding the appropriate response to domestic violence crimes.” Finally, “even officers who are found guilty of domestic violence are unlikely to be fired, arrested, or referred for prosecution.”
What struck me as I read through the information sheet’s footnotes is how many of the relevant studies were conducted in the 1990s or even before. Research is so scant and inadequate that a precise accounting of the problem’s scope is impossible, as The New York Times concluded in a 2013 investigation that was nevertheless alarming. “In many departments, an officer will automatically be fired for a positive marijuana test, but can stay on the job after abusing or battering a spouse,” the newspaper reported. Then it tried to settle on some hard numbers:
In some instances, researchers have resorted to asking officers to confess how often they had committed abuse. One such study, published in 2000, said one in 10 officers at seven police agencies admitted that they had “slapped, punched or otherwise injured” a spouse or domestic partner. A broader view emerges in Florida, which has one of the nation’s most robust open records laws. An analysis by The Times of more than 29,000 credible complaints of misconduct against police and corrections officers there strongly suggests that domestic abuse had been underreported to the state for years.
After reporting requirements were tightened in 2007, requiring fingerprints of arrested officers to be automatically reported to the agency that licenses them, the number of domestic abuse cases more than doubled—from 293 in the previous five years to 775 over the next five. The analysis also found that complaints of domestic violence lead to job loss less often than most other accusations of misconduct.
A chart that followed crystallized the lax punishments meted out to domestic abusers. Said the text, “Cases reported to the state are the most serious ones—usually resulting in arrests. Even so, nearly 30 percent of the officers accused of domestic violence were still working in the same agency a year later, compared with 1 percent of those who failed drug tests and 7 percent of those accused of theft.”
The visualization conveys how likely it is that domestic abuse by police officers is underreported in states without mandatory reporting requirements–and also the degree to which domestic abuse is taken less seriously than other officer misconduct:
The New York Times
For a detailed case study in how a police officer suspected of perpetrating domestic abuse was treated with inappropriate deference by colleagues whose job it was to investigate him, this typically well-done Frontline story is worthwhile.
It would be wonderful if domestic violence by police officers was tracked in a way that permitted me to link something more comprehensive and precise than the National Center for Women and Policing fact sheet, the studies on which it is based, the New York Times analysis, or other press reports from particular police departments. But the law enforcement community hasn’t seen fit to track these cases consistently or rigorously. Says the International Association of Chiefs of Police in a 2003 white paper on the subject, “the rate of domestic violence is estimated to be at least as common as that of the general population and limited research to date indicates the possibility of higher incidence of domestic violence among law enforcement professionals.” Their position on the evidence: “The problem exists at some serious level and deserves careful attention regardless of estimated occurrences.”
An academic study highlighted by Police Chief Magazine relied on newspaper reports for its universe of 324 cases of officer involved domestic violence, or OIDV in their report.
The cases involved the arrest of 281 officers employed by 226 police agencies. Most of the cases involved a male officer (96 percent) employed in a patrol or other street-level function (86.7 percent). There were 43 supervisory officers arrested for an OIDV-related offense. One-third of the OIDV victims were the current spouse of the arrested officer. Close to one-fourth of the victims were children, including a child or a stepchild of the officer or children who were unrelated to the arrested officer. There were 16 victims who also were police officers. Simple assault was the most serious offense charged in roughly 40 percent of the cases, followed by aggravated assault (20.1 percent), forcible rape (9.9 percent), intimidation (7.1 percent), murder/non-negligent manslaughter (4.6 percent), and forcible fondling (3.7 percent).
Data on final organizational outcomes were available for 233 of the cases. About one-third of those cases involved officers who were separated from their jobs either through resignation or termination. The majority of cases in which the final employment outcome was known resulted in a suspension without job separation (n = 152). Of those cases where there was a conviction on at least one offense charged, officers are known to have lost their jobs through either termination or resignation in less than half of those cases (n = 52). More than one-fifth of the OIDV cases involved an officer who had also been named individually as a party defendant in at least one federal court civil action for depravation of civil rights under color of law pursuant to 42 U.S.C. §1983 at some point during their law enforcement careers.
Think about that. Domestic abuse is underreported. Police officers are given the benefit of the doubt by colleagues in borderline cases. Yet even among police officers who were charged, arrested, and convicted of abuse, more than half kept their jobs.
In the absence of comprehensive stats, specific incidents can provide at least some additional insights. Take Southern California, where I keep up with the local news. Recent stories hint at an ongoing problem. Take the 18-year LAPD veteran arrested “on suspicion of domestic violence and illegal discharging of a firearm,” and the officer “who allegedly choked his estranged wife until she passed out” and was later charged with attempted murder. There’s also the lawsuit alleging that the LAPD “attempted to bury a case of sexual assault involving two of its officers, even telling the victim not to seek legal counsel after she came forward.”
Evidence of domestic-abuse problems in police departments around the U.S. is overwhelming.
The context for these incidents is a police department with a long history of police officers who beat their partners. Los Angeles Magazinecovered the story in 1997. A whistleblower went to jail in 2003 when he leaked personnel files showing the scope of abuse in the department. “Kids were being beaten. Women were being beaten and raped. Their organs were ruptured. Bones were broken,” he told L.A. Weekly. “It was hard cold-fisted brutality by police officers, and nothing was being done to protect their family members. And I couldn’t stand by and do nothing.”
Subsequently, Ms. Magazinereported, a “review of 227 domestic violence cases involving LAPD officers confirmed that these cases were being severely mishandled, according to the LAPD Inspector-General. In more than 75 percent of confirmed cases, the personnel file omitted or downplayed the domestic abuse. Of those accused of domestic violence, 29 percent were later promoted and 30 percent were repeat offenders. The review and the revelation led to significant reforms in the LAPD’s handling on police officer-involved domestic violence.”
Will these incidents galvanize long overdue action if they’re all assembled in one place? Perhaps fence-sitters will be persuaded by a case in which a police officer abused his daughter by sitting on her, pummeling her, and zip-tying her hands and forcing her to eat hot sauce derived from ghost chili peppers. Here’s what happened when that police officer’s ex-girlfriend sent video evidence of the abuse to his boss:
Here’s another recent case from Hawaii where, despite seeing the video below, police officers didn’t initially arrest their colleague:
There have been plenty of other reports published this year of police officers perpetrating domestic abuse, and then there’s another horrifying, perhaps related phenomenon: multiple allegations this year of police officers responding to domestic-violence emergency calls and raping the victim. Here’s the Detroit Free Pressin March:
The woman called 911, seeking help from police after reportedly being assaulted by her boyfriend. But while police responded to the domestic violence call, one of the officers allegedly took the woman into an upstairs bedroom and sexually assaulted her, authorities said.
Here is a case that The San Jose Mercury News reported the same month:
Officer Geoffrey Graves, 38, who has been with the Police Department for six years, was charged by Santa Clara County prosecutors with forcible rape in connection with a Sept. 22 incident. The incident began when Graves and three other San Jose officers responded to a family disturbance involving a married couple about 2 a.m., prosecutors said. The officers determined that both spouses had been drinking and had argued, but that no crime had occurred, authorities said.
The woman, who works as a hotel maid, told officers that she wanted to spend the night at a hotel where she had previously worked. About 2:30 a.m., Graves drove the woman to the hotel, where she went to her room alone and fell asleep, authorities said. Fifteen minutes later, the woman heard knocking and opened the door.
Then he allegedly raped her.
There is no more damaging perpetrator of domestic violence than a police officer, who harms his partner as profoundly as any abuser, and is then particularly ill-suited to helping victims of abuse in a culture where they are often afraid of coming forward. The evidence of a domestic-abuse problem in police departments around the United States is overwhelming. The situation is significantly bigger than what the NFL faces, orders of magnitude more damaging to society, and yet far less known to the public, which hasn’t demanded changes. What do police in your city or town do when a colleague is caught abusing their partner? That’s a question citizens everywhere should investigate.
The Palm Beach judge who has thus far refused to release grand jury records in the Jeffrey Epstein case has both professional and family ties to three of the politicians who have a stake in keeping those records secret, the Miami Herald has learned.
Krista Marx, the Palm Beach chief judge who also heads a panel that polices judicial conduct, has potential conflicts of interest involving three prominent players embroiled in the Epstein sex-trafficking saga: State AttorneyDave Aronberg, who has been sued by the Palm Beach Post to release the grand jury records; Sheriff Ric Bradshaw, whose department’s favored treatment of Epstein while he was in the Palm Beach County jail is part of an ongoing state criminal investigation; and ex-State Attorney Barry Krischer, part of the same investigation in connection with his decision not to prosecute Epstein on child-sex charges.
Special prosecutors appointed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis went to court in January to unseal records of Krischer’s secret 2006 state grand jury presentment in the case.
Prosecutors wanted to examine whether Krischer’s office told the panel the full scope of Epstein’s crimes, or whether state prosecutors kept key evidence from the grand jury. The grand jury returned a minor charge of solicitation of prostitution against Epstein, who later managed to negotiate a lenient plea deal, resulting in him serving 13 months in the Palm Beach County Jail, much of at his lavish office in West Palm Beach, thanks to generous work-release provisions.
Local news has never been more important
Last year, following a series of stories in the Miami Herald detailing the machinations behind Epstein’s plea deal, DeSantis ordered a state criminal probe focusing on Krischer’s decision not to prosecute and on Bradshaw’s role in helping Epstein maintain an opulent lifestyle — including having sex with women — while subject to sheriff’s custody on sex charges.
But Marx in January rejected the criminal prosecutors’ effort to unseal the grand jury records, calling it a “fishing expedition.’’ Then on Wednesday, she rebuffed a similar request by attorneys representing the Post, who sued Aronberg, and the county clerk, Sharon Bock, for release of the records.
Duration 1:51
Victims of Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse voice their outrage in court
Nearly two dozen victims of Jeffrey Epstein voiced their outrage at a hearing in Manhattan on Aug. 27, 2019. BY EMILY MICHOT | MARTA OLIVER CRAVIOTTO
Marx was dismissive of the Post’s lawsuit against Aronberg, who has denied he has custody of the grand jury records; and Bock, who has custody of the records but won’t release them without a court order.
Marx, however, did not disclose from the bench that Krischer was her former boss, that her daughter works for Aronberg as an assistant state attorney and that her son works for Bradshaw as a sheriff’s deputy.
Marx’s husband, Palm Beach County Judge Joe Marx, has a disclosure on his county web page stating he would recuse himself from any cases that involve his two stepchildren. Krista Marx’s county web page does not have such a disclosure.
Marx, a six-term elected judge, chairs Florida’s Judicial Qualifications Commission, the state agency that polices judges and handles complaints filed against judges.
The Miami Herald reached Krista Marx on her cell phone late Friday. She instructed a reporter to send her questions via text.
Shortly after, she sent the following:
“A judge is prohibited from commenting on open cases. It is a clear rule of the judicial canons. See cnn 3 (B) 9.”
Krischer did not respond to a request for comment.
Neither the attorney for the Palm Beach Post nor the criminal prosecutor handling the state probe were aware of Marx’s work for Krischer.
The attorneys would not comment on the record, but confirmed they didn’t know that Marx, a six-term elected judge, had worked as an assistant state attorney for Krischer from 1992 to 1998.
In 2012, Marx weighed running for state attorney herself, then decided against it after supporters of Aronberg, the only other candidate, indicated they would file an ethics complaint against her and also run a candidate against her husband, who was up for re-election, the Post reported at the time. Judges in Palm Beach County rarely face opposition and such reelection contests, when they do occur, are costly and time consuming.
Despite his denials, Aronberg, who won that year and has been state attorney ever since, had a “direct, personal role’’ in the events that led Marx to drop her bid, the Post found in 2012.
The Miami Herald could not reach Aronberg for comment.
The Post investigation showed that Aronberg’s campaign manager prepared a five-point public records request in an effort to obtain information detrimental to Marx. Aronberg emailed the request himself to an associate, the paper found. The issue involved soliciting political support from practicing attorneys, the Post said.
BY
The records request was never filed, but Aronberg’s campaign manager acknowledged that he drafted the request to obtain information on Marx because she was planning to challenge Aronberg. Both the campaign manager and Aronberg, however, denied knowing anything about what the Post described as a “threat” to damage Krista Marx’s campaign.
At the time, Marx acknowledged that she was warned by political operatives that several lawyers were preparing to file an ethics complaint against her for soliciting political support from them.
“A complaint would be filed with the Judicial Qualifications Commission and could entail an investigation and hearing that Marx supporters say would have stained her reputation, even if she were exonerated,’’ the Post wrote.
Aronberg, a former member of the Florida Senate and a regular commentator on MSNBC, has said he doesn’t have custody of the 2006 grand jury records. He is a close ally of Krischer, who served on Aronberg’s transitional committee and has done some unspecified “volunteer work’’ in Aronberg’s office, the Post has reported.
A spokesman for Aronberg said that Krischer is not an assistant state attorney in his office. But when asked to clarify what role, if any, Krischer has had during Aronberg’s tenure as state attorney, the spokesman did not respond.
Krischer is also a paid “volunteer’’ in Bradshaw’s sheriff’s department. Public records show he has earned over $112,000 in that capacity.
The original handling of the Epstein case a decade ago stands as a flagrant example of the corrosive effects of power, wealth and privilege on the criminal justice system. Epstein avoided prison despite dozens of young women and girls telling authorities he sexually abused them.
During Epstein’s short stint in the county jail, the multimillionaire was given expansive work-release privileges that are rarely, if ever, afforded to sex offenders in Florida. Bradshaw, one of the most powerful figures in Palm Beach politics, has denied he had a direct role in Epstein’s treatment.
The fight over the grand jury records — with its backdrop of ties between keys players — illustrates the peculiar nature of Florida politics, where behind-the-scenes power brokers and consultants, fueled by money, can decide who runs for office, which incumbents face challengers and which do not, and who is rewarded with political appointments and jobs.
“The system is one that the good ‘ol boys have built for 20 or 30 years. And now, it’s in jeopardy over this case,’’ said Jose Lambiet, a former writer for the Post who covered gossip and politics, including the Epstein scandal, for many years. He also wrote a column for the Miami Herald and is now a private investigator.
“Marx needs to recuse herself and anything that is done in the Epstein case should be in a different county.’’
Gaslighting is an emotionally abusive tactic that makes the victim question their own sanity and perception of reality. In this important talk, Ariel Leve shares some of the life-saving strategies she adopted as a child to survive her mother’s gaslighting.
TEDArchive presents previously unpublished talks from TED conferences.
Enjoy this unedited talk by Ariel Leve.
The Catholic Church needs leaders who can purge corruption even among their own theological allies. The pope is failing that test.
During the Catholic Church’s synod on the family in Rome in 2015, a rough-and-tumble affair in which Pope Francis pushed the assembled bishops to liberalize Catholic teaching on remarriage and divorce, one of the attendees, by the pope’s own invitation, was the retired Belgian Cardinal Godfried Danneels.
Danneels was a natural pick in one sense: One of the church’s prominent liberals, he had been part of a circle that supported Jorge Bergoglio in the run-up to his election as Francis, and in a synodal fight with conservative bishops, the pope needed all the allies he could get.
.. In another sense, though, Danneels was a wildly inappropriate choice, because at the conclusion of his career he was caught on tape trying to persuade a young victim of sex abuse not to go public with allegations against the victim’s uncle, Bishop Roger Vangheluwe of Bruges, Belgium.
.. hauling a cover-up artist out of retirement for a synod on the family was a statement that ideological loyalties mattered more to him than personal misconduct: Sex abuse might be bad, but what really mattered was being on the correct side of the Catholic civil war.
.. after years of failed American attempts to get Rome to take action, Francis’ predecessor, Benedict XVI, placed the already retired McCarrick under some form of sanctions — moving him out of his residence, restricting contact with seminarians, limiting public appearances. It further claims that despite being told that McCarrick was a sexual predator, Francis removed those sanctions, raised McCarrick’s profile and relied on him for advice about major appointments.
.. noting that McCarrick appeared at many events, including with Benedict himself, in the period when he was supposedly under sanctions.
.. given the distracted and ineffectual way that the last pope ran the church, it’s very easy to imagine a distracted and ineffectual attempt to restrict McCarrick being subverted and ignored by the cardinal and his allies in the hierarchy.
.. In which case it’s also easy to imagine a scenario in which Francis didn’t technically “lift” those sanctions so much as acted in ignorance of them, or of their seriousness. He might have been given some knowledge, by Viganò and others, of the allegations against McCarrick but either assumed they couldn’t be that bad (at this point the cardinal mostly stood accused of imposing himself on seminarians, not teenage minors) or else chose to believe a denial from the accused cardinal himself. Why? In part because of perceived self-interest: Francis needed allies, McCarrick was sympathetic to the pope’s planned liberalizing push, and the pope wanted his help reshaping the ranks of American bishops.
.. In this scenario Francis would be guilty of self-deception and incuriosity but not as nakedly culpable as Viganò implies. And if it’s easy to imagine this scenario because of the Danneels example, it’s also easy to imagine because that’s how things have proceeded consistently in the church since the sex abuse scandals broke: If a given predator or enabler is “on side” for either conservatives or liberals, he will find defenders and protectors for as long as events and revelations permit.
That’s a major reason John Paul II refused to investigate Father Marcel Maciel, the wicked founder of the Legionaries of Christ — because the Legionaries were conservative, and apparently a great success, and that was all that mattered.
It’s why many conservative Catholics unwisely defended John Paul II-appointed prelates like Boston’s Bernard Law in the early 2000s.
It’s why a notorious traditionalist priest, Father Carlos Urrutigoity, could find a welcome from conservative bishops in Pennsylvania and then Paraguay, despite a trail of abuse allegations.
.. Now it’s why certain organs and apostles of liberal Catholicism are running interference for McCarrick’s protectors — because Francis is their pope, the liberalizer they yearned for all through the John Paul and Benedict years, and all’s fair in the Catholic civil war.
.. But the inevitable, even providential irony is that this sort of team thinking never leads to theological victory, but only to exposure, shame, disaster. Indeed, the lesson of these bitter decades is that any faction hoping to lead Roman Catholicism out of crisis should begin with purges within its own ranks, with intolerance for any hint of corruption.
.. Francis, alas for everyone, did the opposite. Elected by cardinals eager for a cleanup at the Vatican, he wanted to be a theological change agent instead — which led him to tolerate the corrupt Roman old guard (whose names fill Viganò’s letter) and to rehabilitate liberal figures like Danneels, McCarrick and Cardinal Oscar Maradiaga of Honduras (a dubious figure with a predator among his underlings and a scandal at his seminary) who deserved the sidelines if not a penitent’s cell.
.. purge the corruption he has tolerated and to supply Catholicism with what it has lacked these many years: a leader willing to be zealous and uncompromising against what Benedict called the “filth” in the church, no matter how many heads must roll on his own side of the Catholic civil war.
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