NYC Cops Handcuff, Arrest, and Rape Teenager—and Claim “It was consensual”!
October 30, 2017 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
On September 15, NYPD detectives Richard Hall and Edward Martins rolled up on two boys and a teenage girl (known as Anna) near a Brooklyn park. They harassed and searched them, finding marijuana and anti-anxiety pills in the car and on one of the boys. They then let the boys go, and handcuffed and drove off with Anna. They took her to a Chipotle parking lot where she says that she was forced to perform oral sex on both cops and was raped by one of them. They promised her she would be let go if she went along. Then they dumped her in the street near the local police precinct.
Anna went to the hospital and had a rape exam—police sources told the New York Post that the DNA matched to both of the cops. She reported the assault, and the cops have been indicted for first degree rape and suspended without pay.
The cops’ defense is that the sex was “consensual”! According to them, a handcuffed teenage girl, confronted by two large armed men, and faced with the possibility of being sent to New York’s nightmarish prison at Rikers Island, freely decided that she would like to have sex with two people who held the power of life and death over her!
Obviously, no one in police custody can give meaningful “consent.” In fact, in the state of New York, people in a hospital cannot legally consent to sex with a caregiver. Yet New York law does not prevent cops from using “consent” as a defense for rape.
This is not an isolated case. Rape and sexual assaults are epidemic among cops. In December 2016, Oklahoma City cop Daniel Holtzclaw was convicted of raping eight women. At that time we wrote:
[R]ape at the hands of police is not an “aberration,” it is common. Holtzclaw’s basic M.O. of preying on women who have minor run-ins with the police and demanding sex in exchange for being let go, is widely practiced across the U.S., a familiar fear among women of color, and considered one of the “perks” of the job by plenty of cops.
As the Associated Press reported, 550 cops across the U.S. lost their badges for sexual assault between 2009 and 2014, and between 2005 and 2011, 5,500 were arrested for sexual misconduct. And this is the tip of the iceberg—these were the ones who were caught, and whose superiors decided to discipline or have them arrested rather than covering it up.
The fact that these New York cops acted so brazenly, and glibly offered their outrageous claim of “consent,” reflect that they understand the reality that in this society, rape in general, and rape by cops in particular, is rarely punished. And it, along with so much that has been revealed and exposed in recent weeks, shines a searing light on the deeply engrained, society-wide oppression of women that marks this society, and that cries out for a liberating communist revolution that will rip all this up by the roots.
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