The Stink

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

 

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Episode Transcript

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(02:42):
I've reported this story, a couple of new terms were
forced into my lexicon. I had to google them, but
I sensed they'd 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 u used by various people trying to explain Sandy's

(03:03):
connections to local cops. People who were trying to assure
me that these relationships must have been consensual, that Sandy
just wanted it. She was a self professed cop freak
after all the bills. They saw this coming back in
twenty twenty one. When I told them what I'd found

(03:23):
out about the ten cops, their initial reaction was, here
comes the mud. They knew that some would judge and
blame Sandy. It's a pretty incredible attempt at totally deflecting responsibility.
Jill Philippovich is a feminist author and lawyer. I asked
her what she made of these terms, like if the

(03:44):
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 men who were 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.

(04:08):
Consent can be coerced. Consent can be a product of
fear or a desire to please or just to avoid
a messy scene. Consent is an important concept, but it
has limitations when it's used as the sole factor for
determining whether or not sex is ethical. I think if
we're just thinking of it through this frame of did

(04:30):
she consent or not, then we miss the reality that
the police officers in this situation, they're the adults in
the room. They have a responsibility to cultivate young entrants
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.

(04:52):
Of course, it's possible that a teenage girl is going
to want to have sex with ten different men in
the same department, but that strikes me as un likely.
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

(05:13):
understanding of that is going to be shaped by the
expectations that are set by the men 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 fucked

(05:34):
over so bad? From iHeartRadio. I'm Melissa Jelson and this
is what happened to Sandy Beale an iHeart original podcast,
Chapter four, The Stink. My belief that a number of

(06:00):
PG County police officers were having inappropriate relationships with Sandy
is largely based on Detective Shozelski'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 going to be a stink. I

(06:23):
didn't imagine it being years later, the alusive stink was
going to come back with it. When Detective Shozelski 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

(06:43):
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, often considerably older, and she
was just the cure, you know what I mean. And uh,

(07:05):
I feel though that they should have never done what
they did. Yeah, it was just it's a relief to
hear Detective Shoyshchelski acknowledged this outright, as I've spent much
of the last year exploring the extent of this unethical behavior,

(07:26):
and I want to recap what I've uncovered so far.
Sandy started going 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 pole yard that was known to be frequented

(07:48):
by cops. There was sperm in her body. Her family
recalled that she would socialize 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,

(08:08):
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. 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 this scenario in which the team
was victimized by a group of police officers, because I

(08:30):
think it's very possible that that's what happened. Being deliberately
indifferent to the suffering of women is historic and society,
and it's certainly reflects it in law enforcement. 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

(08:50):
other police officers how to better handle crimes against women.
I've interviewed him in the past, and I trust his
instincts and anybody most 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.

(09:11):
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 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

(09:33):
is look at the history of policing in our country
or in other country. It's been a job for men,
managed by men, 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, and put a bunch of men together

(09:56):
in the room, you're going to have problems. I told
him what I'd learned so far about Sandy, my life
as a cop freak, Doug, the phone calls, the ten cops,
all of it. I mean, there's a potential there for
someone to take advantage of that relationship, no question about it.

(10:18):
First of all, you're not talking about an emotionally mature person.
You're talking about somebody you know very easily the influence
with an offender. It's the perfect setting. You have authority,
you're telling these folks what to do. So can you
imagine what this young woman must have been thinking right

(10:38):
along this police car. You know, a teenager with an
adult with a gun and a badge, with full authority,
So it must have been pretty intimidating. Mark 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

(11:00):
were passing around from one ulcer to the next. You know,
she a young, impressionable woman and they knew it. That's
what made her vulnerable. And nobody with any moral fiber
obviously stepped in and said, what is going on here?
It happened at my academy. You know, instructors extorting young

(11:23):
women for better scores on their test, singling out women
who they wanted to sexually abuse. Well, and this is
the thing about predation. It works better for the predator
if your victim is vulnerable, and what more vulnerable place than,
you know, a desperate young person trying to start a

(11:46):
career in law enforcement. From Mark, the sheer number of
officers involved with Sandy made them suspicious. It's highly unlikely
that they weren't that as police departments are we're talking
about all this and sharing information. It almost sounded like

(12:07):
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 passioning
around for sexual gratification. Mark's theory is that these police
officers they use their power and authority for sexually motivated reasons.

(12:29):
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 the fact that you
have a uniform and you represent authority, and you know

(12:50):
this is somebody using that authority for another reason. This
is somebody you when they tell you to do something,
you obey it. And most people do. They the law.
They don't want to get in trouble with the police.
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(16:50):
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 Cato Institute. Police sexual misconduct is a dry term,

(17:15):
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. And a lot of police sexual misconduct isn't
actually criminal. It is, however, totally unethical. Take for instance,

(17:41):
an officer who responds to a domestic violence call and
uses it as an opportunity to have sex with the
distraught victim. In a number of states, it's even legal
to have sex with someone in your custody. To learn more,
I track down one of the few experts that actually
studies this stuff. My name is Timothy Maher and I

(18:03):
am a professor in the Criminology and Criminal Justice Department
at the University of Missouri Saint Louis. Timothy also used
to be a cop. He spent thirteen years as a
police officer in LaDue, Missouri. I was watching a news
magazine television show back in the early two thousands, and

(18:25):
they did a story on a case in New York
State where a police officer was pulling women over under
the pretense of a DWI stop. He told the young
woman that he was going to cut her a break,
but he still had to punish her in some way.
So he said, as your punishment, I'm going to make

(18:46):
you walk home, and you also have to take all
your clothes off. So she was afraid, and it was
dark and all alone. It was kind of a remote area,
and so she reluctantly agreed, and he graciously let her
keep her shoes on you because she said it hurt
to walk in her bare feet. Timothy quickly discovered that

(19:12):
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 to
report on the police when these incidents occur. They might
report it to someone else sexually assaulted them, but when

(19:33):
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.
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

(19:56):
there's a few people out there still roaming around. And
then there's the pl 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
and even voluntarily talk to me or involuntarily, but there's
no one there to stop you. Really, the truth is

(20:18):
police typically in our society and our culture, are, you know,
have the authority and power and this opportunity to engage.
I learned something interesting about the role of group dynamics
bad behavior can be concentrated to a single shift or

(20:39):
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 PD found that officers
who worked with colleagues who used excessive force were more
likely to engage in the same kind of conduct. The
behavior was contained, as the studies senior author wrote, quote,

(21:04):
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 in law enforcement, not
just for sexual misconduct, but for lots of behaviors. Timothy
has interviewed numerous police officers about their perceptions of police

(21:26):
sexual misconduct. In one two thousand and three study, he
found that while police officers believe that sexual misconduct was
common quote, criminal justice officials have done little to help
control the problem, suggesting that this problem may in part
be fostered by the police subculture. The officers I spoke
with said they drew the line though at very serious

(21:48):
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 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

(22:13):
interviewed sergeants and lieutenants too. What I learned was that,
you know, it wasn't unique just to the patrol officers.
Are the non ranking officers that you know, ranking and
supervising officers were engaging in this behavior as well. I
want to take you back to FOP Lodge number eighty nine,

(22:34):
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 nineteen seventy seven, it's twenty seventeen, exactly
forty years later. It's two am, and a group of
cops are grabbing drinks. Some of them are still in uniform,

(22:57):
including a young woman 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 i'll call David.
The lounge closes and the group migrates outside to the
parking lot. After a while Marie really needs to pee,
so she walks into the woods for some privacy. On

(23:19):
her way back, in the darkness, she's pulled to the ground.
Her lieutenant David has grabbed her. He thrusts his hands
down her trousers, sexually assaulting her. 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

(23:44):
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. After David is charged
with sexual assault, Marie's working environl becomes one of intimidation
and fear. She's shunned by her colleagues and blamed for

(24:05):
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 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

(24:27):
desk job. She later leaves PG County Police due to
what she describes as a hostile working environment. Marie might
have thought she was one of the boys, but she
wasn't part of the brotherhood. Marie, she didn't just lose

(24:48):
her job. Trauma has a cost. It costs time, money, energy,
and it costs Marie her peace of mind. After the assault, well,
she reported having nightmares, crying spells, heightened anxiety. This attack
and the culture that tolerated it had ousted her from

(25:11):
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 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.

(25:35):
Police sexual misconduct has been a problem in our profession
for decades. That's Tom Tremblay. He's a former police chief
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.

(25:57):
You can't talk about policing without a really courageous conversation
about male dominated culture, about hyper masculinity, and this is
something that our profession hasn't done. And when I taught,
when I address hyper masculinity and male privilege in trainings
around the country, I've oftentimes met, you know, in this

(26:18):
male dominated culture with what do you mean male privilege?
What do you mean hyper masculinity? In twenty twenty, Tom
helped to author a model policy for how police departments
should handle sexual misconduct within the ranks. It prohibits using
a law enforcement position, badge or identification card to solicit, initiate,

(26:39):
or core sexual contact with anyone, and it explicitly bans
sexual contact with anyone in a police explorer program. You
might think that police departments would already have specific policies
on this issue, but Tom told me that many don't.
And so one of the major challenges that I see
when I talked to police leaders around the country is

(27:03):
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.
These police chiefs might not feel like it's necessary to
explain to their officers that they shouldn't break the law.

(27:24):
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
that consent shall not be an affirmative defense for any
behavior that's addressed by prohibited conduct of sexual harassment or

(27:48):
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
stop and detain someone, search someone, arrest someone take their
freedom away. All of those things are interconnected. Of course,

(28:10):
a policy on police sexual misconduct is only as good
as its enforcement, But in a culture where secrecy reigns,
mandating that such behavior must be reported can 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

(28:33):
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 employees
from abuse by other employees. And says nothing about the
general public. However, Marilyn did pass a law in twenty
twenty one that prohibits cops from having sex with the

(28:56):
people they interact with in the course of their duties. Victims, witnesses,
and suspects. A brand new historical true crime podcast. The
year is eighteen hundred, City Hall, New York. The first
murder trial in the American judicial system, A messance trial

(29:17):
for the charge of murder. Even with defense lawyers Alexander
Hamilton and Aaron Burr on the case, this is probably
the most famous trial you've never heard of. When you
lay suffering a sudden, violent, brutal death, I hope you'll
think of me. Starring Alison Williams. I don't need anything simplified,
mister Hamilton, Thank you, with Tony Goldwyn as Alexander Hamilton.

(29:41):
Don't be so sad, It doesn't suit you. Written and
created by me Alison Flock. Listen to Erase the Murder
of Elma Sans. She was a sweet, happy, virtuous girl
until she met that man. Right there on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts. When

(30:05):
Tracy were Keel Burns was two years old, her baby
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and no one really talked about it. Her parents told
police she had killed him. Medical records faid that I
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(30:30):
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(32:51):
be a cop, only two percent of law enforcement officers
in the US were women. That number grew to around
thirteen percent 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 thirty two percent of cops are women,

(33:13):
and they have a goal of recruiting fifty percent women
in order to better reflect the diverse communities that they police.
Like Mark Wynn 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.

(33:36):
They're generally less authoritarian and less likely 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 patience and concern
than their male counterparts. But if you're a female victim

(33:58):
in the US, it's to bistically likely that 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 Marie, the female cop

(34:18):
who was sexually assaulted at the FOP lodge. She's 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 dreams. I think she would have been

(34:38):
a trailblazer. She had a strong sense of justice. She
was 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, heartner's humankind in general.
And so we lost somebody that probably could have been
a really good police officer. Look bye now, and she

(35:00):
probably would have made a good cop. Man. You know.
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'd have been an advocate.
She would have been a really strong personality. I would
love to have been able to spend more time. I'd
have to really think about that, because I'm feeling tears
as I think about it. Because we did. We lose

(35:24):
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 Shoshlsky,

(35:45):
expressed no remorse after her death. 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 that police officers respond to. Here's Jill.

(36:10):
I think that does call into 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 misogynist, really toxic group norms and still,
for example, investigate a rape case in a completely full
and fair way, or investigate a suicide of a young

(36:31):
woman in a completely full and fair way. A woman
who may have been slandered 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 think these relationships

(36:54):
Sandy had with local police, and I hesitate to call
them relationships, were on 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 acknowledgment of wrongdoing.
But learning all of this, it doesn't exactly illuminate what

(37:17):
happened in the Pollyard 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 months of asking, they

(37:40):
finally sent me Sandy Bill's file. To my surprise, it
was ninety five 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. Sandy had

(38:02):
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 handled Hanna? Probably less than five
ever in that app to huh No. If you're a

(38:23):
victim of polease sexual violence, I'd love to speak with you.
Please send me an email at what Happened to Sandy
Beal at gmail dot com. What Happened to Sandy Beal
is hosted by me Melissa Jelson. It's written and produced
by me and Katrina Norvel. The podcast is edited by
Abu Safar, sound designed by Aaron Kaufman. Jason English is

(38:45):
our executive producer. Research and production assistance by Marisa Brown.
To find out more about my investigation, follow me on
Twitter at quasimado. That's qu as I am a d Oh.
Thanks so much for listen. Nin