40 percent of police officers convicted of child abuse do not have to go to prison, according to a study

A new Investigation out of The Washington Post has revealed that over the past two decades, nearly 1,800 police officers have been charged with crimes related to child sexual abuse. Worse still, nearly 40 percent of those convicted managed to avoid prison.

The investigation revealed a shocking level of accountability for police officers who sexually abuse minors. Not only did it find that convicted officers often received paltry sentences, but police departments sometimes rehired officers with child sexual abuse convictions.

The postThe analysis examined thousands of court records as well as the Henry A. Wallace Police Crime Database, the county’s most comprehensive database of police arrests. The authors found that between 2005 and 2022, about 17,700 police officers were charged with crimes – and 1 in 10 of them were charged with a crime related to sexual abuse of minors.

The crimes the officers were charged with varied, but most of the charges involved a few specific offenses. postAccording to an analysis by , 39 percent of officers charged with child abuse were charged with rape. Twenty percent were charged with crimes related to child abuse material (another term for child pornography), and 19 percent were charged with sexual abuse.

83 percent of the officers charged were convicted. However, only 61 percent of the officers convicted received a prison sentence. 15 percent were sentenced to prison, and a staggering 24 percent received only suspended sentences, fines, and community service.

But even those arrested received relatively lenient sentences. Half of the defendants were sentenced to less than five years in prison.

Why did so many police officers seem to get away with heinous sex crimes? According to the postit depends on how prosecutors and judges treat police officers.

“Prosecutors have a lot of discretion in the types of charges they bring, the settlements they offer and the cases they want to take to trial,” said the postThe analysis states: “Judges play a crucial role in determining the punishment that officers deserve.”

The police authorities also bear a large part of the blame.

“The departments hired officers who had been accused – or sometimes convicted – of child abuse, domestic violence and other serious crimes,” the post‘s investigation. “In some cases, officers who were fired for their conduct appealed their firing through union protections, got their jobs back, and were then convicted of child abuse.”

The analysis shows how commonplace sexual abuse by the police can be – and how many barriers have been erected to prevent convicted police officers from being adequately punished for their crimes.

“This is happening in communities across the country, but people aren’t aware of it,” said Phillip Stinson, a former police officer and criminal justice professor at Bowling Green State University, who post. “And then police chiefs buy into the black sheep theory and say, ‘There’s nothing to see here, we got rid of that problem when we fired them.'”