
Raped by a Cop, Then Forced to Relive It - pmcpinto
http://www.buzzfeed.com/katiejmbaker/raped-by-a-cop-then-forced-to-relive-it
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cperciva
Can someone explain to me why the county was liable here?

When the crime was reported, an investigation was started promptly; the
accused officer was suspended; and upon the conclusion of that investigation
he was charged, arrested, and is now in jail. It seems like the process worked
exactly as it should here.

Was such criminal behaviour condoned (tacitly or otherwise) by the department?
I've heard stories about this happening in the past, but there's no mention of
anything like that in this article.

Was the department aware of prior complaints? It doesn't seem like it; while
the article implies that this was not the first assault committed by this
officer, the DA's investigation clearly wasn't able to uncover evidence of any
prior complaints, and for all that police officers have a reputation for
standing together I doubt they would bury complaints against a known rapist
that effectively.

A crime was committed, and the criminal went to jail. How does the criminal's
employer come into the picture?

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fucking_tragedy
They provided an environment in which the sheriff felt more than confident
that this could take place with impunity. And he was right. They spent five
years and close to half a million dollars to make sure he saw no
repercussions.

They put him on paid leave two days after he attempted to rape another woman.
A subsequent internal investigation that year turned up evidence of more women
possibly being preyed upon and yet he was on paid leave for three more years
afterwards.

There is no reason to push off an investigation for 9mo other than hoping the
victim would run out of funds and steam and drop the case. A woman was raped
and justice wasn't sought because the offender was one of their own. The
department's conduct in this case is frankly disgusting.

The county knew the power they had versus the limited ability of the victim to
bring the offender to justice. They abused it at every turn to keep a rapist
on their payroll and out of jail because he had a badge. For five years.

~~~
cperciva
_They spent five years and close to half a million dollars to make sure he saw
no repercussions._

No, they spent half a million dollars to make sure that _they_ saw no
repercussions. He was in jail long before the lawsuit was settled.

~~~
fucking_tragedy
Part of making sure they saw no repercussions was covering his ass for as long
as they could. He knew he could hide behind their common interest.

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minimaxir
Note to those who might comment on the domain: this article is on BuzzFeed
News, which is the journalistic, non-clickbait arm of the site.

~~~
silveira
BuzzFeed News has some great articles. Their News branch, not the regular
BuzzFeed's listicles.

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x5n1
It's not a system of justice or truth finding. It is an adversarial system of
fighting with each other in courts.

I totally feel for what this woman had to go through. But imagine most court
battles look like this and emotionally destroy people who are fighting them.

Imagine being a perfectly good parent and then being torn down in court
because of a custody battle. Or being Aaron Swartz and wanting to do good and
free information being threatened with tens of years in prison.

It's a system of fighting predicated upon harassment, character assassination,
and half-truths and lies. Whatever the jury will believe, to win. And after
you win you can't go back and get them for all the shit they did to you in
court. Because most of those things are not actionable, especially when
dealing with the government.

~~~
stcredzero
_It 's not a system of justice or truth finding. It is an adversarial system
of fighting with each other in courts._

From what I have seen, there are a lot of young people who have concluded that
there's no systematic system of truth finding, only adversarial systems of
fighting with each other. Many young people seem to think this is what the
Internet is.

The tragedy is that there are systems for discovering the truth, and there are
better ways of doing things than "win at all costs."

I have no idea if the policeman thought what he was doing was right or wrong
(rationalization is very powerful) but it's clear that he was acting
improperly and abusing his position of power.

~~~
rayiner
The whole process would be a lot simpler if we could only put people in prison
based on someone concluding based on a three-page internet article that "it's
clear [the defendant] was acting improperly and abusing his position of
power."

One of the paradoxical consequences of the Internet age is that people are so
exposed to written communication that they forget the inherently probabilistic
nature of truth-finding.[1] "Instead, Sanchez drove Lindsay down a dirt road
into the pitch-black desert, where he raped her as she cried." Easy to state
with clarity and certainty in a newspaper article--very difficult to establish
with clarity and certainty in real life with conflicting personal accounts.[2]

Litigation is like asking two people who just went through an acrimonious
break-up "whose fault was it?" There is never the kind of clear answer you can
put into a long-form article that rings of clarity and definiteness with every
punctuation mark. There is only ugly, fuzzy, confusing probabilistic truth.

[1] I imagine this certainty that narrative == objective truth was less common
before mass-market narrative, when people had to learn about events through
word of mouth.

[2] In this case that narrative was _probably_ true. But that's all you can
conclude from the jury verdict.

~~~
adrusi
_I imagine this certainty that narrative == objective truth was less common
before mass-market narrative, when people had to learn about events through
word of mouth._

Hah! No this is human nature. Before the internet there was TV, and before TV
there was radio, and before radio there was newspaper. Before newspaper, in
Europe people would hear narratives from the Church via their priests, and at
the most primitve level is gossip.

If anything the internet combats this, by making available a whole array of
narratives to anyone who would look for them.

