From Jake, a story about a dust-up a Los Angeles Community College over the issue of having cops who endorse misogynist nutjob theories in charge of protecting all the people under their jurisdiction, including the women. It all started on November 1st, when some cops that were supposed to be pursuing a rapist asked a group of students if they’d seen the suspect. The students said no, and then one of the sheriffs told the students that “70-80% of rape reports are illegitimate” and that women only file rape charges because they regret some drunken sex. No doubt most of you are familiar with the ubiquitous nature of these myths, which persist in the face of strong evidence to the contrary, including the FBI’s statistics that set the false reports rate at 8%. As Ampersand points out in that post I linked, false reports are not false accusations. The majority of cases I’ve ever read about are Tawana Brawley-type situations where the alleged victim is using a rape claim to weasel out of some other problem, and doesn’t finger anyone in particular. From what I understand, her case only turned up actual suspects because of the amount of politically motivated doggedness behind it, which is probably why rape and murder cases also have a problem with false accusations. Anyway, I don’t know what the statistics are on it, but it seems to me that false reports are correlated with the most terrifying and stereotypical kinds of rape. But the myth is that false reports are correlated to the more common acquaintance rapes, and that the motivation is strictly an unwillingness to admit that one’s self is a dirty slut. My feeling is that men who make this blase statement about false reports are showing more their feelings about the dirtiness of women who have casual sex and projecting that onto women.
Anyway, I don’t how verifiable it is that the sheriff told these students that rape is basically something women make up to cover up our dirty sluttiness, but if he did say it, then it’s quite clear that there’s a serious problem with him continuing to be in a position where his job is to help rape victims. His ability to do this could be seriously compromised by his belief that rape victims are dirty sluts and moral degenerates who would file false accusations. So the students going to the sheriff’s office to file a complaint and demand his resignation and rape education for the police was not outlandish. And they were stalled at the sheriff’s office from filing the complaint, but they did get it filed. Now the people who filed the complaint against the sheriff’s office are being suspended and barred from LACC. From their report of the situation:
We are charged with:
1. Unsafe Conduct
2. Willful Disobedience
3. Unauthorized Entry
4. Disruption of Class
5. Interference with Peace of CollegeOur protest was peaceful. We were asked to leave but refused to until we were given the complaint forms. When the Sergeant who takes the complaints arrived we immediately and of our own accord left the office. This act is nothing but retaliation for students standing up for their rights.
While it’s always feasible that the students are leaving something out of the story, the fact that they showed up with 40 people to file the complaint works in their favor, since that’s 40 witnesses right there. This is some serious overreaction by LACC. I’m hard pressed to think of why it should be such a problem to have students file a complaint against a sheriff for revealing some information about himself (that he’s got hateful attitudes towards rape victims) that compromises his ability to do his job.
31 Responses to “Demand reality-based cops and get kicked out of school”
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I don’t think the issue here is that the investigator expressed his opinions regarding the false accusation numbers. Should this get into a court room the source of that figure should be brought out for all to see as well as the logic behind his choosing to make the female students(and/or others present) aware of this fact. It’s not something they particularly needed to be made aware of legitimate or not. The guy was afterall supposedly in the process of investigating a rapist so it’s not like he was ignoring his job, but why he chose to pass this fact on to the students might suggest he suspected that this might be the case with the victim of the man he was looking for.
What should be made the issue here is that students who went to file a complaint were prevented from doing so then punished for having tried. Clearly this is lawsuit paradise in the making. There is no way in hell the school’s administration can get away with kicking these kids out for doing something lawful for which the police/whatever administrators were trying to obstruct. This is not going to look good in the courtroom and it’s the perfect case for why the right to sue is available to us, to right misjustice of this kind.
As for the investigator himself, the question needs to be asked whether this man was acting out his duties under a preconceived notion that the suspect was actually innocent and the victim was lying. Something that should be left up to a jury to decide, not him.
Cause if true then this man is clearly not suited for this job.
MYOB’
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Sure looks outrageous to me.
Oh, the LA County Bar Association could have a field day with this. I can’t wait to see what happens when the students sue for reinstatement and then ask to get some punitive damages tacked on.
I would suggest that the people responsible for making this decision be fired. Clearly they overstepped the bounds of their authority and did so with malice. This kind of above-the-law manner of running a school has no place in our society today. Fealing you have the right to drop the axe down on these students for doing what was their right as Americans is the act of tyrants and dictators, not a Democratic Republic.
MYOB’
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Of course, regardless of what the cop said, the central issue is that the students are being treated like criminals for complaining about police behavior towards them, and we are supposed to be the boss of the police. But the legitimacy of their complaint is important for establishing why the stalling and treating them like crap was so out of line.
Yet another incident of our official gun-carriers being misogynists and bigots. Why am I not surprised?
Sigh. We’ve been trying for YEARS to uproot the pernicious Darryl Gates “us against them” style of policing in Los Angeles, but it has deep, deep roots. A lot of the cops out here were trained that way and policed that way for at least a decade, so it’s hard to convince them that what they’re doing isn’t working.
The college clearly needs to get its face slapped hard for punishing people who were complaining about police misbehavior (and apparently confronted with more police misbehavior while trying to do so) but the fundamental malevolence of the cops investigating a reported rape is (I think) ultimately more problematic. The minimal description of the reported rapist (a guy in a hoodie sweatshirt) doesn’t square with any permutation of the acquaintance-rape myths the police officer started spouting, and doesn’t seem designed to actually elicit useful information from the potential witnesses.
So the cop gets to go back to the station, report that no one he interviewed saw anyone matching the description of the alleged rapist, and mark the report “unfounded”. It’s been 20 years since the Oakland police department had its ass handed to it on a platter for doing the same thing to victims they didn’t like; so much for progress.
Let me get this straight. Women who regret drunken hookups decide to accuse their partners of rape - thus exposing themselves to humiliating medical examinations, the public scrutiny of various patriarchal assbags, kneejerk accusations of lying, and public shame - because they are embarrassed by the sluttidude of the whole thing and hope to eradicate the stigma.
80% of the time, at that. The scary thing is, I believe he said it and thinks it’s true.
Because obviously, 70-80% of complaints filed against the police are illegitimate.
Well, just hypothesising here, don’t take me too seriously, but I can think of two reasons why the studends were treated the way they were by the school administration.
1) Members of the school admin. are known by the police to engage in activities, illegal or otherwise, which need to be handled with a certain, shall we say, discretion.
2) Community Colleges are designed primarily to train a person for nothing more than entry to mid-level vocational positions. Positions which require, above all else, a willingness to be subservient to figures of authority. By demanding to file a complaint, the students have shown themselves as more-than-potential whistle blowers. They became a threat to the systems of power and exploitation that manage and own civilization, and as such had to be taught a lesson. [Even if the students can mount a successful lawsuit, the emotional toll and “time lost” will probably manage to disuade about half of them from any and all future “stunts” like this one].
Mnemosyne,
The “Gates” tradition goes back way farther than that of course. I believe that someone named Parker was hired in the late ’40s or early ’50s from the Midwest somewhere to make-over the image of the LAPD, which up till then had the reputation of being a bunch of thoroughly corrupt Keystone Kops, basically security goons for the rich and famous. Parker, if I have his name right, came in to impose the model of self-righteous, proactive cowboys who would root out evildoers or anything divergent from a Norman Rockwell image everywhere, high and low. They mainly worked on the “low” part of course. I read some of this in an essay in the LA Weekly over 20 years ago, which pointed out that in most places in the USA jaywalking is a synthetic catch-all law that cops use to lock up folks they don’t like, but the hyperenthusiastic LAPD established the practice of actually ticketing and arresting people merely for crossing streets outside the crosswalks.
The thing was of course that Parker’s crusaders were entirely on board with the de facto segregation that was normal throughout the USA in the ’50s (where it wasn’t encoded into law outright) and kept that attitude through all the reforms of the 60s and later.
Bottom line–it works. It works as well as it always did, for some people. People with a different take on morality like myself might ask rhetorically whether there is any fundamental difference between Parker’s image of cleancut Knights of Decency who enforce order decreed by rich folks in rich and poor neighborhoods alike, and the old go-along-to-get-along ways of the LA Confidential era, and answer, no of course not. Either way the goal is to maintain a profitable and safe order for the propertied powers that be; the Parker way was just better PR.
So when you say it “doesn’t work,” Mnemosyne, for whom do you mean? The idea that middle-class folks had in the 50s and 60s that it _did_ work for them back then had mainly to do with the general prosperity that enabled them to share in the delusion they shared interests with their economic betters, and the general impression of spreading chaos today is mainly because now we are all peons, and the facade has been discarded. But do you mean the rising tide of insecurity must eventually topple the billionaires from their mansions? I doubt it, unless it becomes a tide of actual revolution, in which case perhaps the better cops will join it. (Or let’s be grimly realistic here, the worst ones might rush to change coats first. The ones who try to be decent will probably cling to their misguided loyalties longer.)
There is no persuading the powers that put in the LAPD or most US PDs as we know them today that alternatives that are better for the commoners are going to be better for them.
Though I will recall that after 9/11, there was a distinct amount of foot-dragging by many local PDs who didn’t want to cooperate with domestic spying on the grounds that it would mess up decades of hard work developing community-based policing. But I imagine they’ve all found work-arounds by now.
Well, as a seasoned patriarchy blamer, I am not surprised by this.
I read this thread, then read “Saving Baby Mariam” in this morning’s Boston Globe.
It occurred to me that it is entirely possible that the most capable young police officers in this country joined the National Guard and got sucked into Iraq, leaving a dreg-enriched force to the rest of us. I also wonder this knowing how Zog’s brother avoided recruiting certain types of people (police or not) into the guard because of their attitudes. He targeted stable, mature team players.
Something to think about, particularly if you understand the huge percentage of state troopers who have been deployed - so large that states like West Virginia are seriously understaffed with troopers.
Reading things like this make me so grateful for the campus police when I was in undergrad. One of the police chiefs basically appointed himself to be in charge of all sexual assault cases. I think he knew that there were some assholes on his force and tried to make sure that a woman wouldn’t have to interact with them when she came to the police for help. He seemed incredibly understanding and would even voluntarily attend events at the women’s center that dealt with domestic violence and such.
It’s reading stories like this that make me realize how lucky I have been in my life. I’ve never had to face assholes like this and never had to fear repercussions for trying to combat these attitudes.
My dad used to work with Orange County PD back in the 70s, and this was exactly how he described the mindset - “us against them”. In fact, he said he quit after a couple of years because it was so pervasive. Probably explains why he wanted to become a public defender after that.
I actually have a somewhat darker view of men who hold the belief that rape reports are just buyer’s remorse. I think they’re rapists or potential rapists themselves and that if they allowed themselves to believe what rape victims tell them, they would have to recognize their own conduct as rape.
Keeshond, that certainly fits in well with the idea of “us versus them”. Classic rationalization of cognitive dissonance: we are the good guys - bad guys rape and murder. Therefore, when we do rape and murder, we are really just “keeping order” or “protecting the public” and “giving the bitch what she wanted”.
I’m honestly beginnning to think that Campus Police (who seem to deal with more sexual assault cases than other Police) should just be women-only. Most campus police forces are pretty small, so it’s not like it’d require a massive push to hire or transfer a few female officers to do it.
A female pig can be just as unpleasant as a male one, but at the very least, she won’t be as misogynist.
I’m pretty sure that most police forces were already pretty much made up of the dregs of society in the first place*, so if the best of ‘em are in Iraq, we should really be worried.
*disclaimer: I’m sure there are a few good apples, but I’m talking in general here.
I dunno — I’ve talked to a lot of misogynist women. Can you imagine campus safety officer Coulter? (shudder)
“I’m pretty sure that most police forces were already pretty much made up of the dregs of society in the first place”
Jeez, Labyrus, are you trying to get us all killed? Ssshhhhh, fer crynoutloud
Thanks Mark. I keep wondering why it’s almost always LA cops making the news, at least until the job Guilliani did on the NYPD. I know every city has its share of bad cops but it seems like LA must be screening out the good ones.
Point taken, Ponygirl.
I dunno — I’ve talked to a lot of misogynist women. Can you imagine campus safety officer Coulter? (shudder)
How about Campus Safety Officer Ann Althouse? She’d take your bust measurements, political affiliation and write down how revealing she thought your shirt was; then decide if you were worthy of protection.
Not in California. Of the 64,000 community college grads in 1999, 55,000 went directly to a UC or CSU for their four-year degree. A 2003 survey at LACC found that only 36% of students were there for vocational training; the rest planned to go on to a higher degree. Now, you can question whether or not your second- and third-tier state schools do more than train students for “vocational positions,” but that’s another debate.
There was a very interesting story in the LA Times recently about how LA County Deputies start their job with a 2-year or longer rotation in the county prisons. The point of the article was that when you’re thrown into the deep end like that, you have no choice but to think of it as “us vs. them,” and then carry that attitude with you when you get a patrol position. They’ve recognized for years that it’s a problem, but they say they don’t have the staff numbers necessary to change it.
Also, isn’t it true that women are more likely to acquit in rape cases, in an attempt to believe that they can control whether they are raped themselves? I.e., if the victim’s behavior was somehow part of the reason she was raped, then the jurors feel they can avoid the rape if they avoid that behavior. They’re wrong, of course, but it’s (almost) an understandable reaction.
I don’t know any numbers on that Alecto, but I’m sure it happens–it’s a form of psychological self-protection. Some women internalize the idea (thank you patriarchy) that rape only happens to a certain type of woman, or to a woman who must have done something wrong to invite or allow it. It allows them to say, “Well, yes she was raped, but she did X, and I would never do X, so I could never be raped.”
Blaming the victim is a lot less scary than admitting that it could have happened to you.
“to make-over the image of the LAPD, which up till then had the reputation of being a bunch of thoroughly corrupt Keystone Kops, basically security goons for the rich and famous.”
The LAPD was, before Parker, rather openly a collection of criminals with badges. The depiction of the LAPD by noir writers such as Chandler if anything vastly understate the criminality, incompetence and outright gangsterism of the pre-Parker LAPD.
The depiction of the LAPD by noir writers such as Chandler if anything vastly understate the criminality, incompetence and outright gangsterism of the pre-Parker LAPD.
Bay City PD was Chandler’s corrupt force. Bernie of the LAPD was Phillip Marlowe’s friend, sort of, and the LAPD was shown as somewhat demoralized and cynical, but well meaning and badly underfunded.
When Chandler tried to shoot himself when he couldn’t cope with the loss of his wife, he was not only directly save by a cop who heard the first misfire and entered his house and got him to put the gun down, but a slew of fan mail from police around the world who felt he had improved their public image and understood their troubles and especially the emotional support of the LAPD helped him pull out of the worst of his depression.
/insane fan-girl trivia spewing
Bay City was suppose to be Santa Monica:
From the Wikipedia on Santa Monica Bay: