Rapists in uniform
Here's a pretty old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 16 years ago, in 2008, on the World Wide Web.
Trigger warning. The following videos of two local news stories may be triggering for experiences of sexual assault.
(Via J.H. Huebert @ LewRockwell.com Blog 2008-02-03 and Balloon Juice 2008-02-03.)
Hope Steffey, 47, of Salem, Ohio, is suing for compensation from a gang of men and women who raped her.
In October 2006, in Salem, Ohio, Steffey, 47, was assaulted by one of her cousins in a domestic dispute and knocked unconscious. The family called 911 for help; a sheriff’s deputy named Officer Richard T. Gurlea came out to the house to do some serving and protecting. He asked Hope Steffey for ID, and she mistakenly gave him the wrong driver’s license — one of her late sister’s old licenses, which she kept in her wallet as a memento after her sister died. The cop noticed that it was the wrong license, and, after he got the right one, he refused to give Steffey back her sister’s old license. When she became distraught and pleaded with him to give back the license, Officer Richard T. Gurlea, sanctimoniously instructed her to calm down,
ran a criminal check on her real license (which came back completely clean), demanded to search her car, still refused to give her back her keepsake, and finally, public servant that he is, snapped back Shut up about your dead sister.
Now treating Steffey, the victim of a violent crime who had called for his help and protection, as if she were herself a criminal, he escalated the confrontation, and, when Hope Steffey dared to point at the pocket where he was holding her keepsake and to shout at him about how important it was to her, Officer Richard T. Gurlea courageously defended himself by grabbing the assault victim he had been dispatched to help, slamming her face-down on the hood of his car, and shouting are you going to stop?
Then he threw her down, pinned her to the ground, and handcuffed her. Then he arrested her for disorderly conduct
and resisting arrest,
and took her to the Stark County jail. This is what happened after she was locked up in the jail:
While they were booking her, one of the guards asked her Have you thought about harming yourself?
The purpose of this question is in order to give the jailers an opportunity to label you as crazy for legal purposes, which, in their minds, is reason enough to inflict on you absolutely any kind of cruelty, violence, or invasion of your privacy, and then, to crown all, to turn around and call your torture and humiliation a precaution taken For Your Own Safety. Bewildered and brutalized, Hope Steffey asked for clarification: Now or ever?
In this case, apparently the jailers figured that that was close enough for government work, so what they did was get a gang of male and female guards to surround Hope Steffey and drag her to a cell, then have least two male officers pin her down and hold her arms (she was still handcuffed throughout the ordeal) while female officers stripped her naked and searched her over her screams of protest. After this sadistic sexual assault, they left her locked in her cell, totally naked, without even a blanket to cover herself. She eventually wrapped herself in toilet paper from her cell’s commode, in a desperate effort to keep herself warm and regain a little bit of privacy.
Hope Steffey has filed suit in federal court against the Gurlea, sheriff Tim Swanson, and fifteen unnamed jail guards. Here’s how the sheriff’s office has responded:
In a written response to the lawsuit, Swanson and his deputies deny wrongdoing and maintain the arresting deputy, Richard T. Gurlea Jr., and others at the jail are allowed to use reasonable force to make an arrest and protect prisoners in their custody.
The department does not deny that Steffey was stripped of her clothes and left naked in a cell for six hours.
The defense has asked a judge to dismiss the claims.
— Canton Repository (2008-02-02): Sheriff responds to strip-search video
Tim Swanson’s idea of reasonable force
and protecting
prisoners may be different from yours. If so, you can share your thoughts with him at his office phone number, (330) 430-3800.
There’s a lot more that I might say about this, if I were able to keep on typing. But honestly I can’t. I first learned about this case yesterday, but to write this post I watched the videos over again and I now am shaking so badly with anger and despair that I just can’t keep banging on with the usual stuff. If you want analysis, it’d be about what I said in Rapists on patrol, Law and Orders #6: Pigs at the trough, and Corrections officers; if you imagine this is Yet Another Isolated Incident, then compare it with the more or less identical treatment of Beryl Wilson, Michael Moran, and Ricardo Montalvo by the Kalamazoo City Police, or, Christ, just google around for a few minutes until you’re satisfied. But I’m not about to dignify the fucking pigs in Stark County, or their hordes of freelance sado-fascist police enablers — fouling any Internet or media outlet they can find with putrefying excuses like She gave him a fake ID!
She went psycho! They did what they had to to carry out their policies!
She’s just poisoning the well so she can shake them down in court!
etc. — by pretending as if there were any need, or any room, for debating this. It’s obvious, and it’s caught on tape, and there is no possible excuse. Those who are willing to stand up, in the name of Law and Order and Official Procedures, for officially-sanctioned gang rape, have already done much more to reveal the absolute depravity of their position than anything I could ever say.
Further reading:
- GT 2007-12-21: Rapists on patrol
- GT 2007-12-02: Men in Uniform
- GT 2007-10-28: Corrections officers
- GT 2007-10-02: Public schooling
Update 2008-02-06: I made some minor revisions to one sentence for grammar and clarity.
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That video was terrifying. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to call the police again.
I hope you keep us updated on this. I want to know how the case ends up for her.
What the fuck do they think they’re doing?
By the way Charles, it does occur to me that aside from the institutional problems of the police, the fact that they do deal with some real scumbags for much of the time may twist their behaviour further.
However, even my friend and I in idly surfing the internet in the UK find many incidences of the police being called by parents for really minor reasons, and the fact that the police actually bother to turn up seems odd.
In the US there seems to be an interacting problem between the police behaving like thugs and people’s willingness to call them out unnecessarily. This gives the cops even more excuses to find ways of beating people up, for their own good of course…
Who gives a shit whether or not this was done “by the book”? What fucking book could justify this treatment of a woman?
angryyoungwoman,
I’ve got a Google News tracker on the story. I’ll keep y’all posted on anything I find.
nath,
I’m sure that having to deal with genuine criminals as part of your profession will tend to give you more reasons to adopt an attitude of hardened aggressiveness. To the extent that’s true, it’s a universal danger of professionalized services, and a reason to be at least suspicious of, if not hostile to, any manifestation of them, no matter what the political context. There are certainly other, informal, less-confrontational, non-professional, etc. ways of getting the legitimate work of defending you and yours without them, and I suspect that in a free society we would have every reason to seek those other ways more often than we seek hired muscle or institutionalized jails.
But, on the other hand, I think there’s more going on here than that. After all, cops also have to deal with innocent crime victims all the time, as part of their job, so I think the choice of the scumbags as your model for how to treat people in everyday interactions, rather than the innocents that your job is supposedly to protect, should tell you something about the way they are trained and encouraged to view the rest of the world (whom they now routinely refer to as ).
Of course, one excuse that police-enablers are inevitably going to bring up is that miscategorizing the innocent victims isn’t likely to get you hurt or killed, whereas miscategorizing the genuine criminals can. (Cf. Jeremy’s post at Social Memory Complex on the behavioral traits that cop-trainers tell cops will .) But if that’s the argument that’s being made (and the context in which it is made merits some kind of reply other than the derisive snort that most of this stuff mainly deserves), then I think the thing to point out is (1) that the fact that hassling or brutalizing innocent victims has no real personal consequences for police officers is part and parcel of the problem here, and (2) the deliberate decision, by armed and trained professionals, to err in favor of shoving around, hurting, and torturing the very people whose safety they supposedly signed up to protect, just so that cops can better avoid taking on risks to their own safety, is absolutely despicable. If you are going to choose a line of work that involves taking on danger to protect others, and sanctimoniously lecture everyone about it, then that actually means taking on risks in order to make sure that nobody, not even you, is hurting or endangering innocent people. The belligerent macho flash that police-militarists routinely bring out to excuse or justify this kind of behavior is really nothing more than an expression of the most stinking cowardice.
As for mutual reinforcement, I think I agree with you; and I’d take it a step further. The increasing police presence in even the smallest or most intimate day-to-day conflicts has a lot to do with an increasing cultural shift towards complete dependence on State-sponsored armed factions for every-day matters of self-defense and vindication of rights. The less that we, or trusted advocates known to us, are able take up the task of defending ourselves — which is something that’s happening for both legal and cultural reasons — the more we become directly dependent on professional cliques of armed strangers. And the more that we become dependent on them, the more contemptuous and overbearing they become. Although that applies to everybody, it will apply especially harshly to those who are marked out by the prevailing cultural and legal orders as especially deviant or criminal — e.g. poor people, black men, immigrants, teenagers, certain people labeled as crazy — and also to those who are marked out as especially helpless and therefore in need of the cops’ domineering — e.g. women, children, certain people labeled as crazy, etc. In any case, the more contemptuous and overbearing the professional Protectors become, the more they push for further legal restrictions and further cultural shifts that reinforce our dependence on them, on the assumption that we can’t be trusted to do it for ourselves. And around and around it goes, at least until we do something creative and forceful to break out of this political and cultural death-spiral.
Laura,
Official Department Procedures see all, know all, and justify all. They protect us and they guide us. They speak to us of times of peace and of times of war. They are like the spring rains and the noontime sun. Their mercy is like drops of milk on a parched tongue. Their wrath is like a great whirlwind and the roar of the thunder. They are written in letters of fire upon the heart of every good police officer. Not one sentence of them is false. Not one word is misplaced. Not one letter can be changed. Your lack of faith in The Book grieves the Official Department Procedures.
One of the things I didn’t discuss about this story is that the gang-rape-search did in fact violate the black-letter text of the sheriff’s department internal policies on strip-searches (in that male guards were present during the strip-search). That will, I hope, help Hope Steffey’s case in court. But I don’t think it’s very important in any other context. If the policies said something different, they couldn’t possibly make this one bit less of an atrocity, and even if the pigs had followed their own policies to the letter — i.e. by treating Hope Steffey exactly the same way, but with an all-female gang pinning her down for the strip-search — that would hardly have made it O.K.
Discussed at radgeek.com /#
Rad Geek People’s Daily 2008-02-06 – Quotes for the Day: Ezra Heywood and Frederick Douglass:
FYI.. I came across the video of the action in the cell at another web site. By googling her name, I came across your site. That’s just to tell you how I saw the video…It is now GONE from You Tube. SOMEONE got to them and had them remove both vids… Too many folks seeing their gestapo tactics and it’s getting a bit warm???
I wonder when people will be so fed up with the state, its politicians and their “protectors” – the police – that they will actually retaliate against them. This story is a drop in the bucket of the totality of state abuse and agression against its citizens.
So far there’s plenty of both reason and justification for violent and bloody retaliation against the power establishment.
WHat I find ironic, though, is that a lot of the Republicans who often talk about having arms for the sake of defending yourselfes and your society against usurpers in power have not done zilch to actually make use of those arms, considering the circumstances.
They just sing along and ignore whats going on today…
Erich,
Thanks for the heads up about the videos being yanked from YouTube. I don’t know why that happened, but in any case Part 1 and Part 2 are now back online at a different URI. (The good news is that the take-down and put-back-up process has deep-sixed several ridiculous comments from the perpetually block-headed police-enablers.) I’ve updated the references in the post so that they will point to the working videos.
To be on the safe side, I’ve downloaded the FLV source files for the two video clips and will host them directly from this website if the videos are again taken down from YouTube.
I think the videos were taken down from youtube at the request of the TV station. They were making a big deal about it being an exclusive to their station and I guess they want it kept that way. I watched the videos at their website. So at least so far the cops have not been able to snuff out the videos. A question: why did the cops make a video at all? Wouldn’t just make more sense (not that I think cops have any) to just rip her clothes off and not tape it?
Discussed at radgeek.com /#
Rad Geek People’s Daily 2008-02-18 – Cops are here to protect you.:
Discussed at radgeek.com /#
Rad Geek People’s Daily 2008-02-26 – Cops are here to protect you. (#2):
Discussed at radgeek.com /#
Rad Geek People’s Daily 2008-02-21 – Mississippi Corrections: