When Law, Love Collide in Violence

Bob Reynolds was someone who’d ride to the rescue if you were in trouble. Unless you were his wife, Charlotte.

He whacked her. He wrenched her wrists. He twisted her arms so hard and so often, her elbows still bother her. Twice, he split her scalp with the butt of a revolver, then stitched her up himself.

Like many victims of family violence, she was too frightened to call police. But Charlotte Reynolds had an extra reason not to call.

“Most of the time,” says her husband, “if she called for help, she would have gotten me.”

He was a small-town Texas police officer, sometimes a police chief. Eventually, he got help and came to understand that what he did at home was not just something private, not just a marital problem--it was a crime “from the first time I hit her to the last.”

In the secretive world of American law enforcement, one of the darkest secrets is how many police officers commit the crime of domestic violence, and how slightly they get punished, if they get punished at all.

There is strong evidence that thousands of police batter the ones they love and yet remain on the job, guns strapped to their hips. Often, they are shielded from the consequences of their actions by fellow officers, sympathetic judges and the silent terror of their victims.

“You got to understand where we stand,” Deputy Sheriff Donnie Mohler, a Meigs County, Ohio, dispatcher, told a reporter. “You go home and beat the crap out of your husband, it ain’t the end of your career.”

Most police do not commit domestic violence, of course, and many would not give an abusive colleague a break. But even in police departments that make a special effort to confront the problem, cases of domestic abuse by officers sometimes escape detection; seldom are abusers dismissed from the force.

That means the officer who is beating his or her spouse may be the same one who answers a domestic violence call at your neighbor’s house, or yours. And when the abuser wears a badge, the victim can be the most helpless one in town.

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Because domestic violence by police remains largely hidden, it is difficult to measure.

But Associated Press looked at departments of varying sizes, in various regions, and found evidence of it in 911 dispatch records showing emergency calls from officers’ homes, in department personnel records, in divorce files and in criminal proceedings.

* In Meigs County, Ohio, the bite mark on Heather Harless’ cheek shows clearly in the police evidence photograph. She reported that her husband, State Trooper Tom Smith, bit and choked her in December 1995. He claimed she bit him too, explaining his actions by saying: “You’re trained to react. It’s not just something you can turn on or turn off . . . whether it’s home or on the job.” It took a second fight before Smith, 25, was charged and fined $50 for disorderly conduct. The Ohio State Highway Patrol also suspended him for one day, taken as vacation, when Smith agreed to counseling.

* In Chicago, the wife of Officer James Nelson went to the hospital one day in November 1994 with second-degree burns on her face, neck, shoulder and legs. Her husband intentionally splashed her with hot oil, she told police. The officers who listened to her complaint didn’t arrest him. They didn’t even file a report. Nelson, who has denied the allegation, never faced criminal charges. But an internal departmental investigation of the matter confirmed the wife’s story. As a result, the investigating officers were punished and Nelson, 57, was suspended. The police superintendent wanted to fire him, but the civilian Chicago Police Board ordered him reinstated after he got counseling.

* In Lakeland, Fla., the police chief proclaimed Charles Dallas 1996 Officer of the Year. Chief Sam Baca, who puts a priority on domestic violence, was unaware at the time that Dallas had recently been subject to a yearlong restraining order to protect his wife from him. The order was issued after Elaine Dallas swore under oath that her husband had threatened to kill them both and “bust all of your teeth out.” The officer, 43, declined to be interviewed. He was never charged.

The AP’s findings support the observations of more than 40 experts on policing interviewed for this story. They include police chiefs and patrol officers, psychotherapists who work with police, academics who study them, advocates for victims of domestic abuse, judges and prosecutors. Overwhelmingly, they say that domestic violence by police is a significant problem that has not received sufficient attention.

“The majority of police departments still don’t handle it correctly,” said Anne O’Dell, a former San Diego police sergeant who trains police worldwide in domestic violence prevention. “They’re ignorant about the dynamics of this issue.” Abusive officers “deny, deny, deny, deny,” fooling colleagues and bosses, she said.

Although numbers are hard to come by, two academic studies suggest that police officers are more likely to engage in domestic violence than members of the general public.

Leanor Boulin Johnson, an associate professor at Arizona State University, asked 728 officers in two East Coast departments in the mid-1980s whether they had been violent with their spouse or children in the previous six months. The study did not define what was meant by violence.

The result: 40% of the officers said they had.

Three psychologists followed up that study by surveying 425 officers in the Southwest. The anonymous questionnaire asked how often in the past year the officers had used violence in marital conflicts. That survey defined violence from pushing to using a gun.

Again, about 40% acknowledged violent behavior. This compares with a rate of 16% of couples in the general population, according to studies.

Some experts, including Sheldon Greenberg, a former police administrator who runs the Police Executive Leadership Program at Johns Hopkins University, believe the 40% figure overstates the case. The problem has been “understated for generations, but we want to be careful not to overstate it,” he said.

Other experts, such as Boulin Johnson, find the studies alarming. “The thing that needs to be taken very seriously,” she said, “is that we’re dealing with people who are supposed to be upholding the law.”

Psychologists who study police say it’s not surprising some officers are violent at home; in fact, they say it would be surprising if they were not.

“You have an occupation whose primary or core function is the administration of violence,” said professor Victor Kappeler, an Eastern Kentucky University expert on police deviance. “Would we not expect, then, an entire array of violence outside the workplace, whether against spouses, against children or other people?”

Police are “the heat seekers, the people who like to get things done,” said Albert Seng, a therapist in Tucson, Ariz., who before that was a police officer for 25 years. “I think it’s easier to take that first step when you’ve been working the streets and see people beating each other, or go on domestic violence calls. . . . It’s easier to take that first step of pushing your wife, or beating her.”

Reynolds, the small-town Texas officer who used to beat his wife, says he doesn’t buy the common excuse of stressful police work.

“Everybody has stresses,” he said, adding that his violence was learned as a child, watching his father belt his mother. Reynolds now runs a program for batterers through the Sherman Crisis Center.

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In Broward County, Fla., Chief John Feltgen of the Sheriff’s Department was so concerned about domestic violence by police that he decided to do some research. He examined 911 calls from homes of officers in his department and elsewhere to see what he could learn.

He found that, with disturbing frequency, domestic violence calls made from officers’ homes dead-ended without a report or real investigation.

This finding confirms what many in policing know from experience.

“We know for a fact many of these things are handled informally and do not become part of the record of the department,” said John Firman, research director of the International Assn. of Chiefs of Police. “There’s no question that law enforcement in the past has been a very closed community.”

“Rarely does the question of a police officer committing domestic violence become public,” said Jacqueline St. Joan, a University of Denver professor and former judge who was editor of a guide for judges handling domestic violence cases. “Is it a cover-up? Or a reluctance of spouses calling police? And what’s the police response if and when they are called?”

Helping keep the secret are the insular bonds of the police culture and the power and esteem that come with the badge, suggesting those who wear it do no wrong. The burden of the secret, and of exposing it, falls most heavily on the victim.

Reporting abuse takes courage by anyone. When the batterer is a law officer, the victim’s risks multiply. Interviews with both victims and experts show that victims fear retaliation, or that a successful complaint could cost the abuser his job, depriving the family of income.

At The Spring of Tampa Bay, a shelter in Florida, Lisa Landers notes that clients whose abusers are police officers say their partners tell them: “You go to that shelter, I know where it is. You can’t get away from me.’ ”

Heather Harless, the Ohio woman who accused her state trooper husband of choking and biting her, says a sheriff’s deputy tried to discourage her from filing a complaint. “They told me that my husband had a good job and they wanted to see him keep it.”

The deputy, Jeff Miller, an investigator for the Meigs County prosecutor, denies that he was trying to discourage her. He said he was merely presenting her with a choice. “I told her there was an alternative there. . . . Did I say, ‘I don’t want Tom Smith to lose his job?’ I probably did.”

When officers are the abusers, experts say, the victims often get charged. Abusers in uniform know how to shift blame, said O’Dell, the police consultant. Accused officers say things like, “She’s jealous, she’s nuts, she’s threatened to kill me with my gun,’ ” O’Dell said. “Cops have a unique ability to paint their wives as the perpetrator.”

After their next fight, Heather Harless pressed a charge that her husband bit, choked and shoved her. In return, Smith got her charged with pounding his chest with her fists.

Heather Harless was later cleared, and after Smith pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct, the couple divorced.

County officials insist Smith got no special treatment, but the episode prompted domestic violence training for police and an admonition to treat all abuse cases the same.

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Until recently, only the most vicious abusers in uniform were likely to be fired: if limbs were broken, say, or murder committed, making headlines.

“We fire police officers for stealing. We fire police officers for any other type of crime,” said Drew Diamond, a retired Tulsa, Okla., police chief now with the Police Executive Research Forum. But in many departments, he said, no standard applies to officers who commit family violence.

In 1994, the Southwestern Law Institute and the Arlington, Texas, Police Department surveyed 123 police agencies in communities of more than 100,000 people. They found about half lacked an internal affairs policy on abusers, and that only one in five departments fired an officer after a second domestic abuse offense.

In September, Congress stepped in, extending the federal prohibition against gun ownership or possession by convicted felons to anyone ever convicted of a domestic violence misdemeanor. The law pointedly made no exception for police.

At first, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of the nation’s 700,000 full-time law enforcement officers appeared at risk of losing their guns, and therefore their jobs. Results proved less dramatic.

The ban put officers on desk duty here and there, and booted some out--but not without court fights. In some cases, officers kept their jobs and their guns by getting the courts to erase conviction. Meanwhile, federal lawsuits to block enforcement of the law were filed in Washington, Atlanta, Tallahassee, Fla., and Los Angeles. And police allies in Congress began efforts to relax the legislation.

When the controversy over the ban was aired before the House Judiciary subcommittee on crime in March, only one police group defended the new law.

“We expect police officers to respond and assist victims of domestic violence. What happens if the responding officer is a violator of the law?” said Ronald Hampton, executive director of the 35,000-member National Black Police Assn.

Until the gun law was enacted, a 1995 conviction for beating his then-girlfriend barely dimmed the ambitions of Denver Officer Alex Woods Jr.

For giving Mary Taylor a black eye, split lip and swollen jaw, for choking her until she blacked out, a judge gave Woods a year’s probation and an order to get counseling.

Woods, 26, whose detective dad is a Denver police union president, said in an interview that the accusation was false. The 6-foot-2 officer said he was acting in self-defense against his girlfriend, who is a foot shorter.

Though suspended 20 days without pay after his conviction, Woods got a glowing personnel evaluation. His “judgment has come under some scrutiny during this rating period, as a result of some difficulties while off duty,” his supervisor wrote, but on duty he rated “outstanding.”

Then, last December, Woods was one of two Denver officers disarmed by the new gun law and placed on clerical duty. His chief is waiting to see if Congress amends the law in some way that would let Woods use his gun again.

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Some departments and police organizations have become concerned enough to take action.

“I’m seeing more and more awareness,” said Feltgen, the Broward County, Fla., sheriff’s department official.

For example, the Police Executive Research Forum, a law enforcement think tank in Washington, held its first formal talk on police who commit family violence at its annual meeting in May. And the International Assn. of Chiefs of Police recently received a $145,000 federal grant to draft model policies, training guides and other tactics for police agencies to detect and deal with abusers in their ranks.

In Chicago, the police department took the lead several years ago in creating a unit staffed with civilians to investigate officers accused of family violence.

In Nashville, Tenn., there used to be “a double standard” when domestic violence cases involved officers, said Sgt. Mark Wynn. Today, department policy requires that an investigator be dispatched to the scene and that the chain of command be alerted.

In Detroit, “if somebody slaps their spouse--suspension for 20 days--they lose a month’s salary,” says Detroit Police Cmdr. Michael Falvo. “There is no such thing as minor domestic violence.”

In Baltimore, Col. Margaret Patten, head of research and development for the city police department, hopes to use psychological tests to weed out overly aggressive individuals before they get hired as officers.

“Why are we hiring these people?” she asks.

Many departments do not perform this essential screening, said Sheldon Greenberg, the former police administrator now at Johns Hopkins University.

Meanwhile, some states and communities have passed laws or ordinances requiring arrests in domestic violence cases. But this is no guarantee that police will not give special treatment to their own. There is some evidence that such laws make it more likely that apparent victims get arrested.

The Denver Police Department counts itself among the nation’s most zealous when it comes to confronting domestic violence, including that committed by its officers. The department’s operations manual has two pages of instructions on what to do when an officer is involved.

But even in the most committed department, confronting the problem can be a work in progress.

Denver Police Officer John Burbach and Lori Montano, a Denver dispatcher, were married for three turbulent years. They fought. Each obtained restraining orders against the other in the early 1990s.

She told the court that he abused her regularly, once twisting her arm behind her back so violently that she had to be treated at a hospital for a dislocated shoulder. Burbach alleged that his wife slammed doors, called him names, scratched and kicked him and “attacked” him in the shower.

Lori Montano, 39, declines to discuss any of that now, saying her superiors in the department have forbidden her to talk about her ex-husband. Burbach, in an interview, denied ever abusing her. Neither of them ever faced criminal charges.

Last year, the Denver Police Department trumpeted the launch of an eight-member domestic violence unit thanks to a $198,000 federal grant. Named as its leader: Sgt. John Burbach.

Chief David Michaud said he didn’t know Burbach’s history when he made the appointment. Afterward, he said, he began hearing stories about the 36-year-old officer and ordered an investigation.

“We determined there was nothing that would prevent him from being in that assignment,” Michaud said. “He’s getting rave reviews.”