In 2011, the scandal surrounding San Diego police officer Anthony Arevalos caused an uproar among the city’s residents.
Arevalos was charged with asking for sexual favors from young women whom he pulled over during traffic stops. He frequently molested and abused female DUI suspects, asking them for their undergarments in exchange for letting them go without arrest.
Allegations of sexual assault began pouring in from women who said other San Diego officers also forced them to perform sexual acts.
In the end, out of the 10 officers who were investigated by the city, 6 of them were arrested. Arevalos was sentenced to eight years in prison.
Then-police Chief William Lansdowne publicly apologized for the actions of his officers, and vowed to reform the police department.
But several years later, in 2014, it happened again. Another San Diego officer was arrested and charged for groping women during pat-downs and intimidating them into performing sexual acts for him.
The news of yet another officer gone rogue left the public’s trust in shreds. Lansdowne decided that he would seek out help from the Department of Justice (DOJ) to figure out what went wrong, and how to truly fix the police force.
On Tuesday, the federal authorities finally released their report on the San Diego Police Department. They found that a lack of officer supervision, coupled with the department’s failure to hold offending officers accountable for their wrongdoing, led police misconduct to go on undetected.
