Rachel Harmon: observation

Transcript context

…You spent quite a few years working on the issue of sexual assault by police, right? What’s the main thing the American public does not know about that topic? I don’t think they realize how common sexual assaults by police are, how unlikely they are to be reported, and then how difficult they are to prove once they are reported. I prosecuted cases involving police misconduct for the Department of Justice, and one of the big issues in some of the sexual assault cases I did was that the first complaint, the second complaint, the third complaint would come in. They would come in sporadically. It would be “he said, she said.” The department would investigate, decide that there was no evidence to support the woman’s claim, and the officer would go about his business. The women more often had credibility problems. They might be felons. They might be prostitutes with drug habits, runaways. But over time, what you would see is a department never vindicating those claims, never investigating them thoroughly enough. When you would look at these cases and start actually seriously investigating, you’d realize that actually, this officer had done it dozens of times. Some of them might be beyond the statute of limitations. Some of the women might have serious credibility issues. But you’d get enough that in some cases, I had more than a dozen prosecutable incidents involving sexual abuse by an officer, some of which there had been complaints about, but only some, and none of those had been recognized as legitimate. Even the Justice Department — it would often close the case at least once before I got it. So it’s very hard to see how big the problem is or to investigate and handle those cases. What should we do to improve that problem?…

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