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How The Post investigated police officers accused of sexually abusing kids

The Washington Post has spent more than a year examining police officers accused of sexually abusing kids. Here's how we reported the Abused by the Badge series.

By Jessica Contrera, John D. Harden, Jenn Abelson | 2024-03-27

Jessica Contrera was reporting on child sex trafficking in 2021 when she started to notice the headlines. They appeared in her inbox a few times a month, the product of Google alerts she had set to be notified of stories regarding kids, abuse and the criminal justice system. She was accustomed to seeing stories in which law enforcement officers were mentioned because they were investigating child sexual abuse.

But in these articles, the officers were the abusers.

"Former Lewisville police officer sentenced for sexually assaulting a child"

"Ex-Chicago cop sentenced to 25 years in sex trafficking of young girls"

"Sex abuse victim of former LVMPD officer: 'I was turned into a human pet'"

These headlines frequently called the officers "former." But they were "former" officers only because they'd resigned or been fired after being accused. Many of them had used their jobs to find their victims, who were almost always described as young, vulnerable teenage girls.

She had no idea then just how often this was happening. To find out, she teamed up with investigative reporter Jenn Abelson and data reporter John D. Harden.

The Washington Post has spent more than a year examining police officers accused of sexually abusing children. We discovered that, on average, a law enforcement officer has been charged with a crime involving child sexual abuse twice a week, every week, for 18 years.

But knowing that police officers are sexually abusing kids was just the first step. We wanted to understand how these crimes happen and who is being hurt by them; how officers are investigated and what consequences they face; what's being done to stop predators with badges; and, perhaps most importantly, what isn't.

This year, The Post will be publishing stories about what we've found, including our data on officers' charges, convictions and sentences. We'll introduce you to real kids targeted by officers, take you inside investigations of attempted coverups and show you what happens in courtrooms, where prosecutors and judges decide what abusive cops deserve.

Along the way, we'll keep updating this page to help you understand our methodology: where our information comes from, how we obtained it and what we're still hoping to learn.

We began our reporting with key questions: How often are cops being accused of crimes involving child sexual abuse? What kinds of consequences are they facing? Who are the victims?

One of the first conversations we had was with Bowling Green State University professor Philip M. Stinson, who manages the Henry A. Wallace Police Crime Database. This database is the nation's most comprehensive accounting of arrests of sworn local and state law enforcement officers. The crime database tracks officers whose alleged crimes were discovered, who were arrested and whose charges appeared in news reports.

The Post has worked with Stinson on previous projects that examined police misconduct. For this series, he gave reporters access to the data to conduct an exclusive analysis of child sex crime cases involving officers.

For cases in the crime database that occurred before 2019, Bowling Green has more than 250 data points describing the type and outcome of the criminal charges. Among those data points are whether the allegation was sexual in nature and whether the victim was a minor, defined as under the age of 18. This allowed The Post to identify cases that met our criteria.

Bowling Green delays entering detailed information until the criminal cases have time to make their way through the legal system. To add more recent arrests to our data set, and to find other cases not yet in Bowling Green's data, Harden designed a scraper that used Google's search engine to find news reports mentioning police arrests and sex-related crimes. We also obtained several external data sources, including state-level police misconduct and decertification databases.

Next, Hayden Godfrey, a fellow with the Investigative Reporting Workshop, and a team of journalism master's students with the American University-Washington Post practicum program helped us vet each case to ensure it met our standards for inclusion.

Officers were counted in the data set if they worked full time, part time or in a reserve capacity for a state or local law enforcement department. They must have been employed as a sworn officer at the time of the crime or at the time they were arrested. Federal law enforcement, such as FBI officers and Border Patrol agents, are excluded from the total count to ensure consistency with Bowling Green's approach. We also excluded officers working for correctional facilities, in probation and parole jobs and those who do not have arresting powers.

Like Bowling Green, we coded cases as sex-related crimes based on details described in court records and media reports, not simply the statute with which the officer was charged. This is because prosecutors sometimes charge officers with nonsexual crimes even when the records indicate the alleged crime involved sex acts with a child. For example, The Post found cases in which cops were charged with child endangerment instead of child sexual abuse, or simple battery instead of sexual battery. Chloe Wentzlof, who worked as chief research assistant at Bowling Green's Police Integrity Research Group, reviewed our data entry to ensure consistent coding protocols, with help from assistant professor Eric Cooke.

Abelson, Contrera, Godfrey, practicum student Riley Ceder, The Post's research team and the other American University contributors spent months obtaining thousands of arrest warrants, police reports, court dockets, conviction outcomes and sentencing transcripts to ensure the accuracy of our reporting.

Our analysis identified more than 1,800 officers who were charged with crimes involving child sexual abuse from 2005 through 2022.

This count, however, includes only officers whose alleged crimes were discovered, who were arrested and whose arrests appeared in news reports, decertification databases or court documents.

Sex crimes, especially those involving children, are widely believed to be underreported. Children may be more afraid to come forward; courts may be more likely to seal records involving juveniles; and law enforcement agencies may not make information about the arrests public. Even when case information is available, the decline of local news organizations with resources to cover these arrests makes it easier for criminal charges against officers to escape public notice.

Bowling Green organizes sex-related crimes into categories that include forcible and statutory rape, forcible sodomy, forcible fondling, sexual assault with an object, incest, online solicitation, indecent exposure, and production and possession of child sexual abuse material, among others.

Our data on victims shows that teenage girls, especially those 13 to 15, are the most frequently targeted. Ninety percent of victims were not related to the officer accused of abusing them. We will share additional findings as more stories in this series are published.

It's our job as journalists to hold powerful people and institutions accountable. But to truly understand the harm caused by abusive officers, we knew where we needed to start: learning from real kids.

Contrera and Abelson began by writing letters to young people who had been exploited by law enforcement officers. We also reached out to family members, advocates, attorneys and others who helped kids after the abuse was discovered. We never wanted to make people feel pressured to talk with us. But we wanted to let them know that if they were interested in sharing their experiences, we would be grateful to listen.

Along with photojournalist Carolyn Van Houten, we spent the year traveling to big cities and small towns where officers had preyed upon children. Abelson and Contrera both have extensive experience interviewing children and adults who have been sexually abused. These are among the most delicate and challenging conversations a journalist can have. We worked to ensure our reporting was trauma-informed at every step.

Many of the young people we spoke with were still under 18 when we met them. In those cases, we sought permission from a parent or guardian. When possible, we interviewed family members, friends and other loved ones who witnessed the aftermath of these crimes. As The Post would with any victims of sexual abuse, we allowed them to choose how much identifying information to share with readers.

With the help of The Post's FOIA director, Nate Jones, we filed hundreds of public records requests with law enforcement agencies across America. We obtained employment applications, disciplinary files, investigative documents from criminal prosecutions, forensic interviews, body-cam footage, audio recordings, dozens of victim impact statements and thousands of texts, emails and social media messages. We used these materials, along with our extensive interviews, to reconstruct what happened.

For every story, we worked to interview the accused officers, members of law enforcement who investigated these crimes, prosecutors who took on these cases and judges who handed down sentences. We've also spoken with dozens of people with expertise in law enforcement and sexual abuse prevention to gain insight into systemic failures and best practices.

Do you have a story or tip to share with us? You can email reporter Jessica Contrera here and reporter Jenn Abelson here, or contact us using the form below, and our team may be in touch. We won't publish anything you tell us here without following up.

By submitting, you agree to our submission and discussion guidelines, including our terms of service and privacy policy.

Reporting by Jessica Contrera and Jenn Abelson. Data reporting and analysis by John D. Harden. Hayden Godfrey also contributed to this report.

Photos by Carolyn Van Houten. Photo editing by Robert Miller. Video by Alice Li. Video editing by Joy Sung. Design and development by Tucker Harris. Additional design by Laura Padilla Castellanos. Design editing by Christian Font. Graphics by Daniel Wolfe. Graphics editing by Reuben Fischer-Baum. "Post Reports" production by Ariel Plotnick and Monica Campbell.

Lynda Robinson was the lead editor. Additional editing by David S. Fallis, Anu Narayanswamy, Courtney Kan, Tara McCarty, Christopher Rickett, Ashleigh Wilson, Jessica Koscielniak, Jay Wang, Angela Hill and John Sullivan.

Court records research by Riley Ceder, Razzan Nakhlawi, Jennifer Jenkins, Monika Mathur, Alice Crites and Cate Brown. Public records requests by Nate Jones.

Additional production and support from Steven Bohner, Matthew Callahan, Brandon Carter, Sarah Childress, Emma Grazado, Meghan Hoyer, Chloe Meister, Jordan Melendrez, Candace Mitchell, Sarah Murray, Alexandra Pannoni, Andrea Platten and Kyley Schultz.

Additional contributors from the Police Integrity Research Group at Bowling Green State University are Philip M. Stinson, Chloe Wentzlof and Eric Cooke.

Additional contributors from the American University-Washington Post practicum program are Alex Angle, Riley Ceder, Madeleine Sherer, Ben Baker, Nicholas Fogleman, Daniela Alejandra Lobo, Mirika Rayaprolu, Nami Hijikata, Solene Guarinos, Alexandra Rivera, Ron Simon III, Cameron Jennings Adams, Dima Amro and Siddhi Prabhanjan Mahatole.


This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2024/03/14/police-child-sex-abuse-how-we-reported/


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