When we talk about police violence, the conversation almost always centers on force, shootings, chokeholds, excessive force during arrests. Rarely do we talk about a different, quieter form of abuse of power: sexual misconduct by officers against the very people they’re sworn to protect.
This week, we sat down with Rachel LaPointe, a social worker turned independent investigator and content creator, who has made it her mission to document and expose gendered police violence, one case, one department, one cover-up at a time.
A Pattern Hiding in Plain Sight
Rachel’s research surfaces a disturbing frequency of officers across the country committing sexual crimes against youth, children, and adults. The cases range widely in method but not in outcome:
- Officers caught in online stings attempting to pay minors for sex
- School resource officers sexually abusing students under their supervision, on duty, in uniform
- Repeat offenders quietly moved between departments, sometimes after their previous employer paid out major settlements for the same misconduct
That last point isn’t hypothetical. Rachel’s reporting has uncovered cases like a school district police force hiring an officer whose former department had already paid $1.5 million to settle claims of on-duty sexual misconduct. No red flags. No accountability. Just a new badge and a new set of potential victims.
Why the System Keeps Failing
In our conversation, Rachel breaks down two institutions that consistently fail survivors:
Prosecutors. Across jurisdictions, Rachel has tracked how rarely these cases result in meaningful charges, let alone convictions. even when evidence is overwhelming. The pattern isn’t incompetence; it’s a system built to protect its own.
The media. Perhaps most infuriating is how coverage of these cases gets framed. Headlines describing an officer who “had sex with a student” obscure a simple legal and moral fact: a minor cannot consent. Softened language isn’t neutral, it’s a choice that shields perpetrators and minimizes the crime in the public’s eye. Rachel argues that outlets rarely dig deeper to expose the institutional complicity that allowed the abuse to happen in the first place.
Doing the Work Journalists Won’t
Rachel’s independent reporting, published weekly across Substack, Instagram, and TikTok, has become one of the only consistent records of this issue in the country. She names departments, names officers, and follows the money trail of settlements and quiet rehirings that legacy media outlets routinely skip.
This episode is a hard listen, but an essential one. It’s a conversation about power, silence, and what accountability actually requires when the people meant to enforce the law are the ones breaking it.
