'Driving While Female' study assails police

It's been dubbed "driving while female": A male police officer targets a woman for a traffic stop, then uses the power of the badge to sexually harass or even sexually abuse her.

When they're caught, the officers are often labeled rogue cops and are punished, fired, even jailed.

But a national study released yesterday by a police-accountability expert has cited three such recent incidents in Western Washington as part of what he says is an institutional pattern that leads to a dozen substantiated cases, on average, reported in the United States every year.

The prevalence of these cases calls for overhauls in police policies much like what has been done to combat racial profiling, the report says.

"This problem has existed for ages, and we need to look further to see how to prevent it," said Samuel Walker, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and co-author of the report. "I see this as a problem that can be controlled."

But Seattle-area law-enforcement leaders say the report exaggerates the frequency of such incidents. They say the few cases that have occurred in Western Washington don't justify changing policies that already strictly forbid officers from using their uniforms as sexual weapons.

"We wouldn't see it as a national epidemic inherent to police work at all," said Greg Dymerski, spokesman for the King County Sheriff's Office.

The office forced a deputy to resign in 1999 for stopping a woman so he could handcuff and fondle her, to which he subsequently pleaded guilty.

"The policies we had (forbid) everything he did," Dymerski said. "We couldn't have changed anything that would have changed what happened. He basically decided to stalk her."

The report, "Driving While Female: A National Problem in Police Misconduct," available online at www.policeaccountability.org, found more than 400 public allegations of officers abusing women during traffic stops since 1990. The authors found an average of a dozen substantiated allegations each year.

"Additionally," the report says, "there is good reason to believe that these cases represent only the tip of the iceberg. Many victims did not come forward because of humiliation or fear of reprisal. And some police departments do not accept and investigate complaints from many victims who do come forward."

Among the substantiated cases, Walker said, the study reviewed three cases in Western Washington:

• Last June, fired Snohomish County sheriff's Deputy Charles Adams was sentenced to a year in jail for raping a 17-year-old girl in a police substation after offering to drive her home from a car accident.

• In June 2000, Kitsap County sheriff's Deputy Gary Farvour was fired and given a suspended jail term for assault after he stopped a woman for drunken driving in 1998, drove her home while forcibly fondling and kissing her in his patrol car on the way.

• In the King County case, Deputy Thomas A. Davis was sentenced to 10 days in jail in 1999 after pleading guilty to a felony for pulling over a woman he was casually acquainted with so he could handcuff her and touch her sexually as he frisked her.

The report alleges that some police departments ignore such allegations, have an inadequate system for public complaints or maintain a "sexist culture" that allows such incidents to occur.

The report urges all police forces to gather data on traffic stops to determine whether they have a problem with abuse, a step much like measures aimed at identifying racial profiling. The report also calls for improving training and supervision of traffic officers, toughening policies and hiring more policewomen.

Locally, police leaders don't downplay abuse cases when they do occur, but they say they're not an institutional problem.

Both Dymerski and Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske, whose department had no incidents of sexual abuse cited in the report, said recent improvements in public-accountability procedures and strict sexual-harassment rules and training are meant to prevent such incidents.

"Given the number of traffic stops that are made and the people who are stopped across the nation, I think it's a very small number (who are abused)," Kerlikowske said.

"It's not like you need a separate rule in place. Integrity and trust are paramount issues, but I think this is a very small segment of what goes on in law enforcement."

Ian Ith can be reached at 206- 464-2109 or iith@seattletimes.com.