Ex-cop Daniel Holtzclaw was just sentenced to 263 years in prison for raping black women

Former Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw was sentenced to 263 years in prison Thursday for raping black women who lived in poor neighborhoods on his beat.

Holtzclaw was convicted in December on 18 of 36 counts of rape, sexual battery, forcible oral sodomy, and other crimes against 13 black women who came forward to accuse him of sexual assault.

Civil rights and women’s activists drew national attention to the case when it became clear that an all-white, mostly male jury was going to decide the case — which, given what we know of how racial bias affects jury verdicts, was likely to tilt the scales against the black women who came forward. Ultimately, the women’s stories and the evidence in the case seem to have overcome any potential bias against black women or against rape victims.

The most striking common thread in the testimony of the 13 women who came forward against Holtzclaw was their hopelessness. Many of the victims were low-income women with criminal records. Because of this, most of them said they assumed they wouldn’t be believed if they reported him. So they didn’t.

With the exception of 17-year-old A., who was discouraged by a friend from reporting her rape to avoid looking like a “snitch,” nearly all the women who testified against the officer said they did not report their assaults because they did not think the police would believe them.

“...Who are they going to believe?” said C.J. “It’s my word against his because I’m a woman and, you know, like I said, he’s a police officer. So I just left it alone and just prayed that I never saw this man again, run into him again, you know.”

Another woman, T.M., said, “I didn’t think nobody was going to believe me anyway. And I’m a drug addict, so the only way I knew to handle it was to go and get high to try to block it out, to make it seem like it didn’t happen.”

And T.B. said, “I didn’t think anything would be done. I mean, it was nobody there but just me and him, so to me I just took it as my word against his, so I just blew it off — as best as I could just walked away from it.”

The earliest documented encounter between Holtzclaw and one of the women was December 2013. It wasn’t until June 2014 when a woman identified as J., with the encouragement of her daughter, reported being sexually assaulted by Holtzclaw to police. Her allegations spurred the investigation into Holtzclaw’s interactions with women.

In many cases, the women said they were assaulted after being stopped by Holtzclaw for seemingly no discernible reason. When Holtzclaw ran their names through the police system, he found many had warrants or outstanding tickets. Some had criminal backgrounds, and some were sex workers.

The police stop may have seemed like business as usual for these women; many were of lower economic status, and statistically, poorer black neighborhoods tend to be more heavily policed and experience high rates of incarceration. But the women said Holtzclaw would then leverage this information, stipulating they either go to jail or perform sexual acts on him.

Some of the women testified they had some run-ins with the law previously, and were worried about their records or being sent back to jail. Other times, Holtzclaw found many of these women with drug paraphernalia, or a few accusers said they had been drinking or using drugs right before Holtzclaw approached them. Another had warrants for her arrest and was told that if she complied with him by exposing her body, he would make the warrants go away. In all cases, Holtzclaw abused his own authority as a police officer to take advantage of these women’s vulnerability in the situation and the shame they carried for their prior arrests or drug use.

While the shocking details of Holtzclaw’s case has captured some national attention, a searing Associated Press investigation found that 550 police officers lost their certification from 2009 to 2014 for sexual assault, rape, groping, and forced sexual favors to avoid arrest. Another 440 officers were decertified for other sexual offenses including child pornography voyeurism and consensual sex on the job, which is prohibited.

But as Vox’s Dara Lind pointed out, these 990 police officers were the ones who were caught and then punished for their actions. There’s no account of how many have gotten away with these acts. As Sarasota, Florida, Police Chief Bernadette DiPino told the AP, officers across the country engage with citizens in sexually violent ways. “It’s so underreported,” she said, “and people are scared that if they call and complain about a police officer, they think every other police officer is going to be then out to get them.”

While officer-involved shootings involving black victims do get a lot of attention, sexual assault is the second most common form of police misconduct, according to the African American Policy Forum, citing a 2010 Cato Institute study. Of the 618 officers with sexual misconduct complaints that year, 354 of them were accused of sexual assault or sexual battery. For black women, advocates say the situation is particularly dire.

“Black women are particularly vulnerable to sexual assault by police due to historically entrenched presumptions of promiscuity and sexual availability,” the AAPF wrote in its 2015 report “Say Her Name.” “Historically, the American legal system has not protected Black women from sexual assault, thereby creating opportunities for law enforcement officials to sexually abuse them with the knowledge that they are unlikely to suffer any penalties for their actions.”

All of this makes Holtzclaw’s conviction and sentencing that much more significant, and that much more important to the cause of protecting black women from police abuses.