A New York City politician is trying to make it illegal for cops to have sex with citizens they arrest, insisting that a citizen in custody is incapable of consenting.
Currently, it is only a violation of departmental policy, which means if a cop rapes a woman in handcuffs, then claims it was consensual, he may end up suspended with pay.
Or at worst, charged with a misdemeanor of official misconduct, which can mean anything and everything.
Councilman Mark Treyger (D-Brooklyn) is drafting the legislation after two NYPD cops were accused of raping a handcuffed 18-year-old woman last month, then claiming it was consensual.
New York City police officers Edward Martins and Richard Hall have been stripped of their badges and guns, but they are still getting paid for working desk duty.
While that might seem like a slap on the wrist, cops tend to view it as prison, according to a 2008 New York Times article.
Some monitor surveillance cameras in housing projects. Others escort prisoners to court or check in patrol cars. And some, true to the police lingo, really do sit behind a desk, shuffling papers and answering phones.
These jobs are known as desk duty, a generic phrase in the Police Department for a range of jobs to which hundreds of officers have been reassigned over the years.
Pulled off the streets, stripped of guns and badges, kept inside four walls and away — as much as possible — from the public, officers who are put on desk duty because their conduct is under investigation find themselves far from the enforcement activities they signed up to do.
“We like to call it the ‘cellblock’ because it is like you are in prison,” said an officer who spent more than 18 months watching surveillance video while authorities investigated an accusation that he had struck a suspect.
Treyger, who represents the district where the woman said she was raped, was outraged to learn there is no law stating there is no consent between a police officer and a person they arrested considering the power dynamics of the interaction, writing the following on Medium.
Nearly a month ago, our community was outraged to hear of an incident that occurred between a teenage girl and two Brooklyn South Narcotics Detectives. As details continue to emerge about what happened the night of September 15th, I remain extremely disturbed by this case, and the troubling implications it has for police-community relations.
The Brooklyn DA’s office is actively investigating, and, reportedly, a grand jury has been convened to evaluate criminal charges against the two detectives involved. As the criminal investigation proceeds, however, we, as a community, need to have a conversation about the nature of sexual consent, and our expectations of both authority figures and victims of sexual assault.
New York State law wisely takes into account the impact that involvement with the criminal justice system has on the ability of individuals to give sexual consent: by law, those incarcerated are incapable of giving consent to corrections workers, and those under community supervision are incapable of giving consent to their parole officers. Necessarily, the power dynamics between a trusted agent of our criminal justice system and an individual under supervision mean that no sexual consent can be given entirely free from coercion.
For the full story visit: https://photographyisnotacrime.com/2017/10/it-is-not-illegal-for-nypd-cops-to-have-sex-with-handcuffed-women-one-politician-is-trying-to-change-that/