WEST SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — As darkness falls, the most tattered section of this town's main drag feels more desperate with each passing hour. Under the cover of night, a slow but steady flow of wandering souls emerges — addicts, prostitutes, drifters. Sergio Alvarez knew the pickings were easy.
As a rookie officer on the West Sacramento police force, Alvarez was assigned to the overnight shift on a beat that included West Capitol Avenue — a one-time Las Vegas-style strip now lined with low-rise motels that rent rooms by the week or the hour.
Most officers are more than happy to eventually escape the post, but Alvarez volunteered to stay on late-night duty. Over his nearly six years on the job, he gained seniority and almost always patrolled alone. With the solitude came opportunity.
"That's where Alvarez falls through the cracks," said Sacramento attorney Justin Gingery, whose firm represented four of eight women who said they were sexually assaulted by the officer, many in the same dumpster-lined alley near "West Cap." Convicted last year of kidnapping five of those women and either raping them or forcing them to perform oral sex, Alvarez is now serving 205 years to life in prison.
Alvarez is a poster child of a predator cop — and also of the flaws in policies, technological glitches, and culture of policing that can allow such behavior to go unnoticed or unpunished until it's too late. His case prompted multiple civil claims against his department and the city of West Sacramento over police procedures, with a total of $4.1 million in public funds to be paid to six victims who sued. It also has left a new chief taking a hard look at the way the department does business.
"It hurts the heart to see victims. But it makes it even worse when you are, in one way, shape or form, a contributing factor to them being hurt," said Tom McDonald, a former captain with the Los Angeles Police Department who took over in West Sacramento after Alvarez's arrest.
A yearlong Associated Press investigation illuminated the problem of rape and sexual misconduct committed by lawofficers in the United States, uncovering about 1,000 cops, jail guards, deputies and others who lost their licenses from 2009 through 2014 for such incidents. Most certainly there are even more than that, because some states did not provide records and others, including New York and California, said they do not decertify officers for misconduct.
The International Association of Chiefs of Police spotlighted the issue of sex abuse in a 2011 report prompted by a spate of crimes. The report noted conditions of the job that can create opportunities for officers to take advantage of victims — having authority over others, patrolling alone and late at night, and engaging with vulnerable citizens.
Those issues were hallmarks of the Alvarez case and many others, along with critical breakdowns in policies and procedures. Those include a lack of supervision and training fueled by budget cuts; misuse or malfunction of electronic systems meant to monitor officers; warning signs about potential misconduct that are overlooked; and a good old boy culture in which inappropriate behavior is ignored or even condoned.
A lack of supervision was a major finding in a March Department of Justice report about the San Diego Police Department that some call a blueprint for preventing sexual misconduct. That force has been hit with several incidents in recent years, including the case of 18-year veteran Anthony Arevalos, convicted in 2011 of sexual battery and assault following accusations that he attacked 13 women.
Despite departmental reforms put into place that same year, two more big cases followed. One officer was at the center of a lawsuit brought by a woman who said he groped her and exposed himself in 2013; he left the department with no criminal charges. And last year, former officer Christopher Hays was sentenced to a year in jail and three years' felony probation after three women said he touched their breasts and other private areas during searches.
The cost to the citizens of San Diego has been significant: The city has paid more than $7 million to settle lawsuits brought by the women in all three cases.
In its investigation, the Justice Department found that budget cuts had hit the San Diego department hard, with staffing reductions a "key problem."
Nearly a quarter of sergeant positions — considered first-line supervisors — had been filled with acting sergeants who lacked the training and authority of their predecessors. Sergeants also were not always working the same shifts as the people they supervised, and sometimes saw subordinates only once a week, "creating an environment more vulnerable to undetected misconduct," the report said.
The situation left peers often supervisi