The details of as many as 277 possible domestic violence related crimes involving Los Angeles police officers were posted on the internet on Friday. Bob Mullally, a lawyer from South Dakota, performed a review of personnel files of officers accused of domestic abuse and produced a report detailing 61 assaults, 28 assaults with a deadly weapon, six rapes and one sodomy. Mullally faces possible jail time for violating a court order that sealed this report but he says it was a decision of conscience to release the report anyway. Not a single one of the cases in his report were ever prosecuted, nor were any of the police officers accused of these crimes arrested. Instead, the complaints were placed in confidential personnel files, sealed, and never reopened. In an anonymous questionnaire of police officers asking if they had ever used violence in their homes, over 40 percent responded that they had. Penny Harrington, Director of the National Center for Women & Policing says, “This means that a woman calling for help has almost a 50/50 chance of getting a batterer answering her call.” The LAPD has said they have changed its handling of domestic-violence cases involving officers and they now provide domestic violence training to new recruits.
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