NYPD Officers Claim “Consensual” Sex With Teenage Detainee
It’s time to close an outrageous loophole in NYS law
On the night of September 15th, 18-year-old Brooklyn resident Anna Chambers and two male friends were pulled over by two plainclothes police officers for driving through a Brooklyn park after hours. Officers Richard Hall and Eddie Martins, both part of the NYPD narcotics unit, searched the car and found loose prescription drugs and marijuana.
Both Chambers’ male companions were allowed to leave, while Chambers was detained by Hall and Martins. About half an hour later, her friend went to the 60th precinct station where he had been told she would be taken. She had never been there. According to the the New York Post,
He left and found her waiting by his car, visibly upset.
“Her hair was a mess, and she ran up to me and gave me a hug, and she was like, ‘They f–ked me. They f–ked me,’ ” he said.
‘’They forced me to have sex with them.’
According to Chambers, after her friends left, the officers, instead of driving her to the station, drove 4 miles in the opposite direction, and parked the unmarked police van at a Chipotle in Bay Ridge. Chambers alleges that the Officer Martins told her she could get out of the arrest in exchange for sexual favors. During the course of her detainment she was allegedly coerced into performing oral sex on both officers and one of them raped her as she begged him to stop. Chambers says she was handcuffed during the entire encounter.
According to the district attorney, the officers were never supposed to have been in the park in the first place, having left their post without authorization.
Chambers went to a hospital the same night and was given a rape kit, which matched DNA found on her body with that of the two officers in question.
Astonishingly, the defense is arguing that the sex acts were consensual. The defense has hinted they will attack certain inconsistencies in different “versions” of Chambers’ story, and lack of evidence to substantiate parts of the testimony, as well as Chambers’ behavior on social media since the incident, which they claim seems inconsistent with that of a victim of sexual crime. But no one is denying that the 1) the sex acts occurred and 2) that Chambers was detained in the officers’ vehicle when they occurred.
It seems inconceivable to think that someone being detained in police custody could legally be said to have consented to sex with their arresting officer(s), but according to Natasha Lennard in The Intercept, the New York penal code neglects to establish this:
Under New York penal law, there can be no consensual sex between corrections officers and prisoners in their charge, nor between a patient committed to a hospital and those charged with their supervision. Yet there is no such law for the police. While, as the NYPD spokesperson told me, “it is against department policy to have sex on duty,” the law does not preclude consensual sex between an arresting officer and a person in their custody.
According to Alex Vitale, a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College, who Lennard interviewed for the article,
It seems clear that it was the intent of the legislature to protect people in police custody, but the wording now says the protection only kicks in when you get to the station house.
Councilman Mark Treyger (D-Brooklyn) has responded to the incident by drafting legislation that would make it a crime for police officers to engage in sexual activity with anyone in their custody, but the fact that no such legislation already exists — especially when the precedent is established in other parts of the penal code — is troubling, to say the least.
The officers are being charged with, among other things, second-degree kidnapping. Whether they will be found guilty or not, the incident certainly brings into focus how uniquely capable a police officer would be of carrying out such an abduction. Most people would not step into a van in the middle of the night at the request of two strangers. Chambers would not have been in that van in the first place if those men did not have badges. If proving rape against an arresting officer is a matter of not only proving the sexual act itself but proving empirically that the victim did not consent, that means that it would be nearly impossible to convict a police officer of a crime that a police officer would be uniquely capable of committing. This is more than a failure to prevent abuse; it is practically an invitation.
It would be comforting to think that if the court fails to find a predatory police officer guilty of a crime, he would at least lose his job for breach of police policy, but the process involved with actually firing a police officer — heavily influenced by powerful police unions — is notorious for its cronyism and lack of public accountability.
Staunch police defenders are fond of saying that we shouldn’t judge all police officers by “a few bad apples.” However, our current system entrusts law enforcement with special power and neglects to hold them accountable at the level that that power demands. The mechanism for ejecting these “bad apples” is weak and ineffectual, both emboldening bad cops and eroding public trust. A public that does not trust its law enforcement is a public that will not cooperate with its law enforcement. The upshot? It’s a more dangerous world for both private citizens and good cops. This must change.
