QUIS CUSTODIET IPSOS CUSTODES
Means "Who Polices the Police?"

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

Oklahoma sheriff charged with using inmates as sex slaves

Authorities have charged a western Oklahoma sheriff with coercing and bribing female inmates so he could use them in a sex-slave operation run out of his jail.

Custer County Sheriff Mike Burgess resigned Wednesday just as state prosecutors filed 35 felony charges against him, including 14 counts of second-degree rape, seven counts of forcible oral sodomy and five counts of bribery by a public official.

Burgess, the top officer in the county of 26,000 since 1994, appeared in court Wednesday was released after posting $50,000 bail.

"We are stunned," Undersheriff Kenneth Tidwell said Thursday.

Click here for the rest.

Well, I'm not stunned.

As usual, I make these cop corruption posts not to assert that cops are bad guys or anything along those lines, but rather to show that police culture, and perhaps the overall American cultural understanding of policing, makes an ongoing situation such that crimes like the one described above, and many others, are likely to happen again and again. The hypermasculinity, the us-versus-them attitude, the self-righteousness, the willingness to look the other way when fellow officers break the law, all these aspects of cop culture make "bad apples" or "isolated incidents" a certainty. That is, as long as the organizational culture of police departments across the land remains in this gun-toting 19th century mindset, we're going to continue to see headline after headline like the one above.

And the headlines only represent the cops who get caught. It's a safe bet that many more cop misdeeds never see the light of day.

Don't get me wrong. I acknowledge that cops are human beings and just as prone to criminal behavior as anybody else, but I think the high number of such instances we endure now could be greatly reduced, if only we started looking as police in terms of institutional culture, rather than on the case-by-case basis we use now.

But first, society has to admit we have a problem.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$