How The Post investigated police officers accused of sexually abusing kids

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 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. It 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 officers charged with crimes involving child sexual abuse.

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 alleged victim was a minor, defined as under the age of 18. This allowed The Post to identify cases that met our criteria.

From 2005 through 2022, about 17,700 state and local officers were charged with crimes, including physical assault, drunken driving and drug offenses. The Post found that 1 in 10 of those officers were charged with a crime involving child sexual abuse.

Bowling Green delays entering some 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, Post FOIA Director Nate Jones, The Post’s research team, practicum student Riley Ceder 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 at least 1,800 officers who were charged with crimes involving child sexual abuse from 2005 through 2022.

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.

We followed the coding protocol established by Bowling Green, which 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.

For the purposes of our chart on the types of charges officers face, we streamlined the offenses into five categories. “Rape” includes charges such as forcible rape, statutory rape, forcible sodomy and sexual assault with an object. “Forcible fondling” includes offenses such as child molestation and indecent liberties. “Child sexual abuse material” includes the production, possession and distribution of images or videos of child sexual abuse. “Online solicitation” includes offenses such as enticement by an electronic communication device. All other charges are reflected as “Other.”

The Post found the majority of arrested officers were charged with crimes involving the direct abuse of kids, including rape and forcible fondling.

Abusive officers were rarely related to the children they were accused of sexually assaulting, molesting and exploiting. And they most often targeted teenage girls. Court records and police reports show that officers commonly exploited children who were vulnerable in some way; they may have run away from home, been struggling at school or experienced a traumatic event. The race and ethnicity of children in these reported crimes was not documented in news stories, police reports and court records frequently enough for The Post to conduct a meaningful analysis of those data points.

For each case, we also learned about the officer accused. Our findings show that 99 percent of arrested officers were male. Two thirds had worked in law enforcement for more than five years.

As part of our investigation, we wanted to understand the consequences for the officers charged with these crimes. However, Bowling Green’s database did not include the outcomes in every officer’s case. With the help of The Post’s research team, we obtained hundreds of court records on convictions, plea deals, sentence lengths, among other data points.

Some cases were impossible to track because prosecutors struck deals that allowed officers to accept responsibility for their crimes without a conviction being placed on their record. Others were permitted to have their criminal records sealed after meeting certain conditions. We confirmed the outcomes of cases not already in Bowling Green’s database through court records, prosecutors or clerks.

We limited our analysis to criminal cases from 2005 through 2020, before the pandemic caused delays and backlogs in the court. The Post determined the outcomes for about 1,500 officers during this time period, and found that at least 1,200 were convicted. Of those officers convicted, nearly 40 percent avoided prison sentences. Around half of those who were sentenced to time behind bars received five years or less.

Officers often did not serve their full sentences. Through public records requests to corrections departments across the country, as well as the Federal Bureau of Prisons, The Post determined that at least 330 of the officers in our analysis who had been sentenced to prison were no longer incarcerated. On average, they served roughly 63 percent of their sentences before being released.

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 anyone who is being identified as a victim of sexual abuse, we allowed each individual to choose how much personal information to share with readers, including whether they wanted to be identified by their full name, first name, middle name or in some cases, just an initial. A similar approach was taken with photos: some chose to show their faces while others preferred to be photographed in a way that partially or entirely concealed their identities. Reporters worked closely with each person to explain the different options and allowed them to make whatever choice was best for them.

With the help of 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-camera footage, audio recordings, dozens of victim impact statements and thousands of texts, emails and social media messages.

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 to keep them from happening again.

Officers’ photos were obtained through the agencies they worked for, the agencies that arrested them, the jails or prisons they were incarcerated in and sex offender registries, among other sources. In cases highlighted in our series, we reached out to the accused officers or their attorneys, as well as the agency the officer worked for, to provide them with the opportunity to discuss the case and its consequences.

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RAINN, an anti-sexual violence organization, operates a 24-hour National Sexual Assault Hotline by phone at 800-656-4673 and online at hotline.rainn.org.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children operates a 24-hour call center for reporting suspected child sexual exploitation by phone at 1-800-843-5678 and online at cybertipline.org.

These organizations work in partnership with local service providers as well as with law enforcement agencies across the country.

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You can also email reporters Jessica Contrera, Jenn Abelson, and John Harden at abusedbythebadge@washpost.com and our team may be in touch. We won’t publish anything you tell us without following up.

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

Photos by Carolyn Van Houten and Madeline Gray. Photo editing by Robert Miller. Additional photo editing and research by Troy Witcher and Max Becherer. Video reporting and editing by Alice Li. Additional video editing by Joy Sung. Design and development by Tucker Harris. Additional design by Laura Padilla Castellanos, Emily Sabens and Emma Kumer. Design editing by Christian Font. Graphics by Daniel Wolfe. Graphics editing by Reuben Fischer-Baum. “Post Reports” and audio production by Ariel Plotnick and Monica Campbell.

Lynda Robinson was the lead editor. Additional editing by David S. Fallis, Peter Wallsten, Anu Narayanswamy, Courtney Kan, Tara McCarty, Christopher Rickett, Amy Nakamura, Brandon Carter, Kyley Schultz, Ashleigh Wilson, Jordan Melendrez, Leila Barghouty, Thomas LeGro, 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. Additional research by Aaron Schaffer. Public records requests by Nate Jones.

Additional production and support from Steven Bohner, Matthew Callahan, Sarah Childress, Nicole Dungca, Emma Grazado, Meghan Hoyer, Chloe Meister, Candace Mitchell, Sarah Murray, Alexandra Pannoni, Andrea Platten, Victoria Rossi, Anthony Rivera, Kevin Schaul, John Taylor and Elana Zak.

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, Solène Guarinos, Alexandra Rivera, Ron Simon III, Cameron Jennings Adams, Dima Amro and Siddhi Prabhanjan Mahatole.