BLUE WALL & FOOTBALL
Police not doing their job in college towns part of the problem at Baylor, elsewhere
When are all of the good police officers going to rise up and start investigating those few bad cops? • If you want to stop the raping and pillaging by football players at Baylor and other campuses across the country then let’s start by cleaning up college town police departments that too often are more interested in protecting the team’s brand than protecting the team’s victims. • In my mind, this is the most disturbing aspect of the biggest college football scandals in recent memory. It’s obviously despicable when corrupt football coaches like Art Briles ignore allegations of gang rape, but it becomes downright depressing when police officers seem to be accomplices in the cover-up.
It’s sad when a few jocksniffing cops give a bad name to all of the ethical, hard-working policemen who risk their lives every day.
“It’s a huge issue and it’s way too common in these college towns,” said well-know attorney John Clune, who has represented college women in rape cases at Florida State, Baylor and many other bigtime institutions of higher earning. “I think it has to do with the dominant football culture in college towns. Law enforcement is a maledominated community in itself. And in a lot of cases, local law enforcement officials work the football games as part of the security staff and become caught up in the culture of wanting to see the team do well.
“Between the messages the football players are getting from the school itself and from law enforcement, they begin to believe the rules and laws don’t apply to them and they can do whatever they want.”
This certainly seems to be the case at Baylor, where an alleged victim claimed Waco police responded to the scene of an alleged gang rape in 2013 involving two football players. The victim claims police did not aggressively investigate and did not even file a police report on the matter. In a recent interview with CBS, Baylor chief financial officer Reagan Ramsower was asked about the 2013 incident.
“There was a police report. I suppose it stayed with the police department,” Ramsower said. “It never came out of the police department. That was a significant failure to respond by our police department; there’s no doubt about it.”
In another case, according to ESPN, Waco police took extraordinary steps to keep the football player’s case from the public view. In fact, the investigating officer asked a commander that “the case be pulled from the computer system” and placed in a locked office.
A policeman’s motto is supposed to be to “to protect and serve,” not to “ignore and suppress.” A current lawsuit alleges 52 rapes by Baylor football players over a fouryear period, but how many of those sexual assaults could have been averted if local police had aggressively gone after the accused rapists?
The same at Penn State, where a monster like Jerry Sandusky was allowed to sexually assault countless young boys for more than a dozen years after police first learned he was a child molester. Sandusky was accused of showering naked and having inappropriate contact with a boy all the way back in 1998. In an interview with police then, he admitted to the crime, but said he was wrong and would never do it again. The district attorney in State College, Pa., said no charges would be filed and the university police chief quickly instructed that the case be closed. Sandusky was finally arrested for being a serial child rapist 13 years later.
And then, of course, there’s the Tallahassee (Fla.) Police Department’s inept — if not corrupt — investigation into allegations of rape against Jameis Winston. The investigation was so shoddy, Leon County State Attorney Willie Meggs said of TPD investigators: “They just missed all the basic fundamental stuff that you are supposed to do.”
The case laid dormant for nearly a year until reporters from the Tampa Bay Times and TMZ came sniffing around. Only then did police bother to inform Meggs that there was an “active” sexual assault investigation involving FSU’s star quarterback.
Lo and behold, Winston’s attorneys wound up with official police reports before Meggs did, enabling them to interview witnesses even before investigators could get to them.
“Tim Jansen (Winston’s attorney) knew more about the so-called investigation than we did,” Meggs said in one interview with Fox Sports. “He’s telling me things and asking me questions about things only I ought to know. … It does handicap a case.” We could go on and on. We could ask why convicted murderer and former University of Florida All-American Aaron Hernandez was never even questioned by Gainesville police in a shooting back in 2007 when he was initially considered a suspect? The shooting — which left two men wounded, including one who was shot in the back of the head — remains unsolved.
Unsolved, uninvestigated and unprosecuted crimes involving college football players in college football towns has become a national embarrassment.
But I guess we shouldn’t be surprised.
It is, after all, extremely difficult for policemen to gather evidence when they’re wearing pom-poms.