The Stink — Sandy Beal E4

The exact nature of Sandy's relationships with local police officers comes under new scrutiny. 

 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Before we begin, please note this series includes talk of
suicide and sexual violence. Please take care while listening. Badge, bunny, holster, sniffer,
road hog. As I've reported the story, a couple of
new terms were forced into my lexicon. I had to

(00:23):
google them, but I sensed the be derogatory, and I
was right in the most crude fashion. They're used to
describe women who have sex with cops on duty. These
were terms that were used by various people trying to
explain Sandy's connections to local cops. People who were trying
to assure me that these relationships must have been consensual,

(00:46):
that Sandy just wanted it. She was a self professed
cop freak, after all the bells. They saw this coming back.
When I told them what I found out about the
ten cops ups, their initial reaction was, here comes the mud.
They knew that some would judge and blame Sandy. It's

(01:08):
a pretty incredible attempt at totally deflecting responsibility. Jill Filipovic
is a feminist author and lawyer. I asked her what
she made of these terms, like if the telling is okay,
this girl was just a badge bunny, a pistol sniffer.
That really does remove the bigger picture, which is that
in this particular case, it was a group of adult

(01:29):
men who are in charge of this teenage girl. I
have no hard evidence that Sandy didn't consent to these
relationships with PG County Police, but even if she did consent,
it doesn't mean these relationships were appropriate. Consent can be coerced.
Consent can be a product of fear or a desire

(01:49):
to please or just to avoid a messy scene. Consent
is an important concept, but it has limitations when it's
used as the soul factor for determining whether or not
sex is ethical. I think if we're just thinking of
it through this frame of did she consent or not,
then we missed the reality that the police officers in

(02:10):
this situation, they're the adults in the room. They have
responsibility to cultivate young entrance into their field. What instead
she's learning from these men on the force is that
she's a sexual object that she's expected or perhaps wanted
to have sex with them. Of course, it's possible that
a teenage girl is going to want to have sex

(02:31):
with ten different men in the same department, but that
strikes me as unlikely. What strikes me is more likely
is that this is a teenage girl who is just
sort of figuring out who she is as an adult,
who is just figuring out what it means to have
a job, what it means to enter a male dominated workforce.
All of her understanding of that is going to be
shaped by the expectations that are set by the men

(02:52):
who are already doing that job. Before Sandy died, she
wrote something that gets to the heart of how these
relationships made her feel. Quote but as always, they have
their fun and the hell with you? Why me? Why
do I get sucked over so bad? From my Heart Radio,

(03:15):
I'm Melissa Jolson and this is what happened to Sandy
Beale and I Heart original podcast, Chapter four, The Stink.
My belief that a number of PG County police officers

(03:37):
who are having inappropriate relationships with Sandy is largely based
on Detective Schelski's recollection that he was inundated with phone
calls after her death. Were cops all but admitted to it?
What did you make of her spending all this time
and having sexual relationships with police officers? I knew it was,

(03:58):
I didn't imagine the best. Years later that a steak
is going to come back fro. When Detective Selski initially
told me about the phone calls, it was an offhand
remark that he didn't seem to attribute much meaning to.
That's how I interpreted his tone, anyway. But I've spoken

(04:19):
to him a number of times since, and he told
me that he too believes that Sandy was horribly used
mistreated by his fellow cops. They were all right, often
considerably older, and she was just a kid, you know
what I mean. And uh, I feel though that they

(04:43):
should have never done what they did. You know. It
was just it's a relief to hear Detective Selski acknowledged
this outright, as I've spent much of the last year
exploring the extent of this ethical behavior, and I want
to recap what I've uncovered so far. Sandy started going

(05:06):
on ride alongs in her senior year of high school
at just eighteen years old. At the time of her death,
she was in a relationship with one cop, a married
state trooper named Doug. Her body was found a mile
away from his place of work in a pollard that
was known to be frequented by cops. There was sperm
in her body, her family recalled that she would socialize

(05:29):
with police officers at night. Her address books were filled
with the names and numbers of local cops, including some
that I've been able to confirm participated in the Explorer
program at that time. But honestly, there's a limit to
the knowledge I can gather about Sandy's relationships with local cops,
and at this point, I feel like I've hit it.

(05:50):
Unless I get some new information. That doesn't mean I'm
going to stop probing the question of what all this means.
I think we owe it to Sandy to contemplate the
scenario in which the team was victimized by a group
of police officers, because I think it's very possible that
that's what happened. Being deliberately and different to the suffering

(06:12):
of women is historic and society, and it certainly reflects
it in law enforcements. So that's what you saw. Mark
Wynn is an expert in police violence. He's a retired
police officer who now works to train other police officers
how to better handle crimes against women. I've interviewed him
in the past, and I trust his instincts, and if

(06:34):
anybody wants to debate me on this, I'm more than
happy to do it. I mean, I'm not somebody just
read this somewhere. I spent my entire adult life working
in law enforcement, so I know my family well. Mark
started policing in nineteen seventy seven, the same year Sandy died.
He looks like what you might envision when you think
of a cop. He's tall and broad shouldered and has

(06:56):
a thick mustache. He's also one of the most courteous
and patient individuals I've ever met. If you ever have
to call the cops, you'd want someone like Mark to
show up. Well, all you have to do is look
at the history of policing in our country. You know
the country. It's been a job for men, managed by men,

(07:17):
run by men, and that's true for the most part
in the entire criminal justice system. I think when you
exclude women from any you know, function, social or government, uh,
and put a bunch of men together in the room, Uh,
you're gonna have problems. I told him what I had
learned so far about Sandy, my life as a cop freak, Doug,

(07:41):
the phone calls, the ten cops, all of it. I mean,
there there's a potential there for someone to take advantage
of that relationship, no question about it. First of all,
you're not talking about an emotionally mature person, Um, you're
talking about somebody's you know, very easily. The influence with

(08:02):
an offender is the perfect setting. You have authority, you're
telling these folks what to do. So can you imagine
what this what this young woman must have been thinking
right along this police car. You know, teenager with a
with an adult with a gun and a badge, with
full authority, So it must have been pretty intimidating. Mark

(08:24):
was pretty blunt and forthcoming with his theory about Sandy's case,
and he told me he'd seen things like it before.
I suspect and from what I've seen in other situations,
they were passing around from one alstar to the next.
You know, she young, impressionable woman and they knew it.
That's what made her vulnerable. And nobody with any moral

(08:48):
fiber obviously stepped in and said, what is going on here?
It happened at my academy, Um. You know, instructors extorting
young women for a scores on their tests, singling out
women who they wanted to secually abuse. Well, and this
is the thing about predation, um, it works better for

(09:12):
the predator if your victim is vulnerable, and what more
vulnerable place than, you know, a desperate young person trying
to start a Korean law enforcement For Mark, the sheer
number of officers involved with Sandy made them suspicious. It's
highly likely that they weren't as close knit as police

(09:35):
departments are, weren't talking about all this and sharing information.
It almost sounded like she was being trafficked from one
officer to the next. Tractors obviously make money off of it,
but they weren't making money. If this is the case,
they were passion around for sexual gratification. Mark's theory is

(09:58):
that these police officers they use their power and authority
for sexually motivated reasons. There's actually a term for that
police sexual misconduct, and for victims who experience it, it
can be an extremely isolating kind of abuse. Well, this
is the thing with any kind of misconduct. I mean

(10:19):
the fact that you have a uniform and you represent authority,
and you know this is somebody using that authority for
another reason. This is somebody you when they tell you to
to do something, you obey it, and most people do
they follow them all there. You know, they don't want
to get in trouble with the police. I want to

(10:50):
take you down a short tangent now, because I don't
think you can understand Sandy's story without knowing more about
the culture that allows this kind of abuse to flourish.
And it does flourish because despite very few victims wanting
to come forward. Sexual misconduct is the second most frequently
reported form of police misconduct, according to research by the

(11:11):
Cato Institute. Police sexual misconduct is a dry term, but
it encompasses a wide range of troubling behavior, everything from
stopping a car without cause to flirt with the driver
to a sexual shakedown, which is when an officer extorts
sexual favors in exchange for not ticketing or arresting the person.

(11:33):
And a lot of police sexual misconduct isn't actually criminal.
It is, however, totally unethical. Take, for instance, an officer
who responds to a domestic violence call and uses it
as an opportunity to have sex with a distraught victim.
In a number of states, it's even legal to have
sex with someone in your custody. To learn more, I

(11:58):
tracked down one of the few experts that actually studies
this stuff. My name is Timothy Maher and I am
a professor in the Criminology and Criminal Justice Department at
the University of Missouri St. Louis. Timothy also used to
be a cop. He spent thirteen years as a police
officer in La dou Missouri. I was watching a news

(12:20):
magazine television show back in the early two thousands, and
they did a story on a case in New York
State where a police officer was pulling women over under
the pretense of a d w I stop. He told
the young woman that he was going to cut her

(12:41):
a break, but he still had to punish her in
some way. So he said, as your punishment, I'm going
to make you walk home, and you also have to
take all your clothes off. So she was afraid. It
was dark and all alone, it was kind of a
remote area, and so she reluctantly agreed, and he graciously

(13:04):
let her keep her shoes on because she said it
hurt to walk into her bare feet. Timothy quickly discovered
that there was very little research on police sexual misconduct.
We don't even have answers to basic questions like how
prevalent it is. We have no way of knowing how
much of this behavior goes on. Many people are reluctant

(13:26):
to report on the police when these incidents occur. They
might report to someone else sexually assaulted them, but when
a police officer sexually assaults them, they often think twice
about it, and many of them frankly don't report it.
And when victims do report, it's generally their word against
a sworn police officer. The cover of darkness plays a role.

(13:49):
It's it seems funny, but a lot of this behavior
goes on after hours when there's very few other people
around to witness it, and everybody else goes to bed,
but there's a few people out there still roaming around,
and then there's the police, because the police work at night.
You know, you can stop a car, if you want
to stop a car, you can get out and walk
around and confront people and ask them to come over

(14:11):
and even voluntarily talk to me or involuntarily, but there's
no one there to stop you. Really, the truth is
police typically in our society and our culture are are
you know, have the authority and power and this opportunity
to engage. I learned something interesting about the role of

(14:35):
group dynamics. Bad behavior can be concentrated to a single
shift or a particular group of officers. The day shift
could be fine, for example, but certain night shifts may
tolerate deviant behavior. One study looking at the Chicago p
D found that officers who worked with colleagues who used
excessive force were more likely to engage in the same

(14:58):
kind of conduct. The behavior was contagious, as the studies
senior author wrote, quote, officers peers may serve as social
conduits through which misconduct is learned and transmitted, but there
is that culture of not reporting on fellow officers generally

(15:18):
in law enforcement, not just for sexual misconduct, but for
lots of behaviors. Timothy has interviewed numerous police officers about
their perceptions of police sexual misconduct. In one two thousand
and three study, he found that while police officers believed
that sexual misconduct was common quote, criminal justice officials have
done little to help control the problem, suggesting that this

(15:41):
problem may in part be fostered by the police subculture.
The officers I spoke with said they drew the line
though at very serious criminal behavior, inappropriate comments the sex
on duty, minor violations of rules and regulations, where you
know what, they don't report on each other it's the

(16:02):
blue wall of silence. It's that you just don't deal
with that. Most of them would say, I'm not their supervisor.
I don't have to deal with them. That's the boss's
job now. I interviewed sergeants and lieutenants to what I
learned was that, you know, it wasn't unique just to
the patrol officers. Are the non ranking officers that you know,

(16:23):
ranking and supervising officers were engaging in this behavior as well.
I want to take you back to fo P Lodge
number eighty nine, the cop club in Prince George's County,
the place where Sandy's family said she would get drinks
with police after hours, except instead of ninety seven, it's

(16:49):
exactly forty years later. It's two am, and a group
of cops are grabbing drinks. Some of them are still
in uniform, including a young woman and who I'll call Marie.
She's just a few years out of the academy and
she's hanging out with her coworkers and her lieutenant, who
all called David. The lounge closes and the group migrates

(17:12):
outside to the parking lot. After a while, Marie really
needs to pee, so she walks into the woods for
some privacy. On her way back, in the darkness, she's
pulled to the ground. Her lieutenant David has grabbed her.
He thrust his hands down her trousers, sexually assaulting her.

(17:34):
Marie doesn't officially report the incident, fearing retribution. Even as
a new cop, she understands the consequences of squealing on
a fellow officer, But news of what happened gets around
the department, and two years later she's called into internal
affairs and asked about the incident. She speaks her truth.

(17:57):
After David is charged with sexual assault, Marie's working environment
becomes one of intimidation and fear. She's shunned by her
colleagues and blamed for the prosecution of her abuser, even
receiving a threat via text. In a brazen show of
solidarity with her lieutenant, high ranking police officers packed the

(18:17):
courtroom to support him at trial. Ultimately, he's found guilty
and sentenced to seven years in prison. Marie is reassigned
to the evidence department, in effect a desk job. She
later leaves PG County Police due to what she describes
as a hostile working environment. Marie might have thought she

(18:39):
was one of the boys, but she wasn't part of
the brotherhood. Marie, she didn't just lose her job. Trauma
has a cost. It costs time, money, energy, and it
costs Marie her peace of mind. After the assault, she

(19:01):
reported having nightmares, crying spells, heightened anxiety. This attack and
the culture that tolerated it had ousted her from a
community she worked so hard to join, and then she
was blamed for her own downfall. All of this made
me think of Sandy. If Sandy was a victim of

(19:25):
some kind of police sexual abuse, I think it's fair
to assume it would have weighed heavily on her mental
health too. One more secret the teen had to carry.
Police sexual misconduct has been a problem in our profession
for decades. That's Tom Tremblay. He's a former police chief

(19:48):
with a thirty year career in law enforcement. These days,
he works to advise police departments on how to respond
to domestic violence and sexual misconduct, including within its own ranks.
You can't talk about policing without a really courageous conversation
about male dominated culture, about hyper masculinity, and this is

(20:10):
something that our profession hasn't done. And I when I
taught when I address hyper masculinity and male privilege and
trainings around the country, I'm oftentimes met, you know, in
this male dominated culture with what do you mean male privilege?
What do you mean hyper masculinity? In Tom helped to
author a model policy for how police departments should handle

(20:31):
sexual misconduct within the ranks. It prohibits using a law
enforcement position, badge or identification card to solicit initiate a
coerced sexual contact with anyone, and it explicitly banns sexual
contact with anyone in a police explorer program. You might
think that police departments would already have specific policies on

(20:55):
this issue, but Tom told me that many don't, and
so one of the major challenges that I see when
I talk to police leaders around the country is the
first thought process is, we don't need a policy to
tell officers they can't sexually harass or sexually assault colleagues
or citizens. We just don't need that. It's not necessary.

(21:19):
These police chiefs might not feel like it's necessary to
explain to their officers that they shouldn't break the law.
But a lot of police sexual misconduct isn't illegal, and
without it being clearly defined, it lives in this murky
space of being wrong but silently tolerated. One of the
policy components that I recommend that law enforcement consider is

(21:41):
that consent shall not be an affirmative defense for any
behavior that's addressed by prohibited conduct of sexual harassment or
sexual misconduct. Meaning a cop can't just justify breaking the
rules by saying that the victim consented simply because the
police the badge and the gun, and the authority to

(22:02):
you know, stop and detain someone, search someone, arrest someone,
take their freedom away. All of those things are interconnected.
Of course, a policy on police sexual misconduct is only
as good as its enforcement, but in a culture where
secrecy rains, mandating that such behavior must be reported can

(22:22):
help to break apart the blue wall of silence. If
someone sees something or suspects something, they're obligated to come forward,
not to turn away. The PG County Police Department does
not have a police sexual misconduct policy, though when I
asked a spokesperson about this, they sent me a few
pages on discrimination and sexual harassment. That policy only protects

(22:46):
employees from abuse by other employees and says nothing about
the general public. However, Maryland did pass a law in
that prohibits cops from having sex with the people they
interact with in the course of their duties, victims, witnesses,
and suspects. When Sandy started training to be a cop,

(23:16):
only two percent of law enforcement officers in the US
were women. That number grew to around by the end
of the nineties, and then it just stagnated. It has
remained virtually the same for over two decades. Compare that
to New Zealand, where I was born. They're about of
cops or women, and they have a goal of recruiting

(23:39):
women in order to better reflect the diverse communities that
they police. Like Mark Wind said, the consequences of leaving
women out of the room are severe. Not only can
it breed hyper masculinity, but it doesn't reflect the true
makeup of society. And there's evidence that women police differently
than men do. They're generally less authoritarian and less likely

(24:03):
to employ both excessive and deadly force, and they may
be uniquely positioned to help female victims of crime. Studies
show that domestic violence victims, for example, are more likely
to report to female cops, who tend to show more
patients and concern than their male counterparts. But if you're
a female victim in the US, it's statistically likely that

(24:24):
a male police officer will respond to your call for help.
He likely will have been trained by a man, his
boss is probably a man, and he will have spent
his entire career working in an environment where women's voices
are rarely heard. I keep thinking about Murray, the female
cop who was sexually assaulted at the FOP lodge. She's

(24:45):
not out in the world working as a police officer
right now. Like Sandy, she didn't get to fulfill her potential.
How many other women have similar stories. Here's Kim and
Stephen talking about Sandy's dream. I think she would have
been a trailblazer. She had a strong sense of justice.

(25:06):
She was um, someone that knew the streets well and
understood urban life, and she would have just been really great.
She had a heart for people, heart for women, heart
humankind in general. And so we lost somebody that probably
could have been a really good police officer looking back now,
and she probably would have made a good cop, you know,

(25:26):
I mean, she could have handled being a cop. You
know what I'm saying that, You know, if that kind
of gives you an insight, she had a bet at
an advocate, she would have been a really strong personality.
I would love to have been able to spend more time.
I have to. I have to really think about that,
because I feeling tears as I think about it. Because

(25:47):
we do, we lose out our dreams and our desires
got thwarted. They got it, got dashed, taken away from us.
The way Sandy was treated by PG County cops, who,
according to Detective Shachelski, expressed no remorse after her death,

(26:12):
it was like she was less than in their eyes, disposable.
It made me wonder how their attitudes towards women might
have carried over into their work, influencing the way they
interacted with female victims. It's worth noting that domestic violence
calls are the largest categories of calls the police officers
respond to. Here's Jill. I think that does call into

(26:34):
question how they behave in other aspects of their work, right,
how they investigate crimes against women, how they treat acts
of sexual violence. I just don't see a universe in
which you can have those really misogynists, really toxic group norms,
and still, for example, investigate a rape case in a
completely full and fair way, or investigate a suicide of

(26:55):
a young woman in a completely full and fair way,
A woman who may have been landered as a quote
badge bunny, one who may have been at the center
of a stink. I took you down this road, this
tangent on police sexual misconduct to help explain why I

(27:16):
think these relationships Sandy had with local police, and I
hesitated to call them relationships, were unethical and wrong. PG
County knew about these relationships while they investigated her death,
and they didn't say anything to her family. There was
no acknowledgement of wrongdoing. But learning all of this, it

(27:38):
doesn't exactly illuminate what happened in the Pollard that night
and whether it was Sandy who used the gun that
ended her life. So in our next episode, I want
to return to the physical evidence, reviewing it with top
experts in the field. And right when I was assembling
this episode, I got an email from PG County. After

(28:02):
months of asking, they finally sent me Sandy Bill's file.
To my surprise, it was pages long, and it revealed
something new that upended my assumptions about how and when
Sandy became so close to PG County police. Because As
it turns out, she had reached out to them for help.

(28:24):
Sandy had a stalker. That's on our next episode. How
many times in your career if you remember, have you
seen a teenage girl shoot herself? Canceled? Ever in the
at No. If you're a victim of police sexual violence,

(28:48):
I'd love to speak with you. Please send me an
email at what Happened to Sandy Beale at gmail dot com.
What Happened to Sandy Beale is hosted by me Melissa Jolson.
It written and produced by me and Katrina Norvell. The
podcast is edited by Abusa far Sound, designed by Aaron Kauffman.
Jason English is our executive producer. Research and production assistants

(29:12):
by Marissa Brown. To find out more about my investigation,
follow me on Twitter at quasimato. That's qu a s
I am a d O. Thanks so much for listening.