While Kamala Harris was bringing trumped-up child-exploitation charges against a classifieds website, a cadre of California cops was actually paying, pimping, and passing around an underage girl for sex and getting away with it. A damning new report explains the extent that the Oakland Police Department (OPD) was involved with the girl, who goes by the pseudonym Celeste Guap, and also details OPD leadership’s myriad attempts to make the scandal disappear.
Throughout the investigation of the cops, Guap, now 19, was treated like a suspect. One investigator even called Guap a “whore.” Others accused her of lying and later misrepresented her statements to their bosses.
On Monday, a federal judge rebuked the City of Oakland and its police for the “severely mishandled” investigation. Since 2003 the OPD has been subject to federal oversight, thanks to racially biased policing, excessive use of force, and a refusal to comply with attempts at reform. The Guap case came along just as the Oakland police were starting to show some signs of improvement—and quickly “scuttled the city’s attempt to get out from under 15 years of federal court supervision,” notes NBC.
The probe started after the September 2015 suicide of Officer Brendan O’Brien. In a note, O’Brien described Guap as the catalyst for his decision. He said they had met through Facebook earlier that year and struck up a relationship—a nonsexual one, he claimed, though Guap said differently—that ended when she threatened to expose it.
Screenshotted conversations found on O’Brien’s phone (he left his passcode in his suicide note) show Guap texting with O’Brien and at least one other officer. In these conversations, Guap—the daughter of an OPD police dispatcher—claims to have “been involved” with many OPD cops, including O’Brien, while she was still legally a child. She would later tell investigators that she first started sleeping with local police officers when she was 14 years old.
For the full article visit: https://reason.com/blog/2017/07/13/oakland-police-corruption-comes-out