Hundreds of law enforcement officers in the United States have sexually abused children over the past two decades, while officials at every level of the criminal justice system have failed to protect kids, punish abusers and prevent additional crimes, an investigation by the Washington Post revealed.
At least 1,800 state and local law enforcement officers were charged with crimes involving child sexual abuse from 2005 through 2022, the Post found. The officers worked at all levels of law enforcement, on forces as big as the roughly 33,600-officer New York Police Department and as small as a two-officer agency in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia.
Police and sheriff’s departments across the country have enabled predators by botching background checks, ignoring red flags and mishandling investigations, the report found. Accused cops have used their knowledge of the legal system to stall cases, get charges lowered or evade convictions. Prosecutors have given generous plea deals to officers who admitted to raping and groping minors. Judges have allowed many convicted officers to avoid prison time.
In a comprehensive database of police arrests managed by Bowling Green State University, one in ten officers were charged with a crime involving child sexual abuse.
Abusive cops frequently spent months befriending and grooming kids, and many used the threat of arrest or physical harm to make them comply, police and court documents show. And The Post found that in cases across the country, even if the abuse occurred while officers were off duty, they regularly met their victims through their work.
"This is heinous conduct that we cannot tolerate,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney General Kristen Clarke, who heads the division of the Justice Department that prosecutes officers accused of civil rights violations. Members of law enforcement who have exploited their positions of power, she said, have left child victims with “no recourse and no one else to protect them.”
But nearly 40 percent of convicted officers avoided prison sentences, the Post found. Cases sometimes fell apart after kids became too scared to cooperate. In other instances, prosecutors were reluctant or faced resistance to aggressively pursue charges against their colleagues in law enforcement with whom they work closely and rely upon for investigations. The Post surfaced cases in which officers were accused in police reports of sexual contact with minors but were charged only with non-sex crimes such as simple assault or official misconduct.
"This happens to communities all across the country, but it’s not on people’s radar,” said Stinson, a Bowling Green criminal justice professor. “And then, police chiefs adhere to the bad apples theory, where they say, ‘There’s nothing to see here, we got rid of this problem when we fired them.’”