Even though they are busy serving as bouncers at Starbucks, crashing black cookouts and shooting black people in the face, police officers around the country often find time to have sex with the people they are arresting.
I had no idea this was a thing, but apparently, Kansas and 33 other states allow cops to stop and get frisky with whomever they choose, as long as it is consensual. And of course, it is always consensual. After all, who would feel intimidated by someone with a badge, a gun, pepper spray, handcuffs, and the full weight and authority of the law?
Allow me to pause here and tell you that, even though you might think you know where this story is going, it is so much worse.
It begins with Lamont McIntyre, a black Kansas City, Kan., man who was imprisoned at the age of 17 for committing a double murder. Despite there being no physical evidence, no murder weapon, and no connection between the suspect and the murder victims, McIntyre spent more than two decades in prison before he was finally released. McIntyre was awarded a grand total of zero dollars when he was finally freed.
So why was he in jail so long?
It turns out that the lead investigator in McIntyre’s case was a cop named Roger Golubski who worked as a law enforcement officer for 30 years before retiring recently. A few years before the murder, Golubski allegedly forced a woman to have oral sex with him during a traffic stop (which, at the time, was perfectly legal). After the incident, the woman said that she refused Golubski’s advances and that he threatened to retaliate against her and her family.
That woman’s name was Rosie McIntyre, Lamont’s mother.
Rosie McIntyre tried to explain to prosecutors that Golubski was targeting her son, but the prosecutor wouldn’t listen. In this specific case, I can’t even say that it was because the prosecutors were racist because evidence later showed that the judge in the case was engaged in a sexual relationship with the prosecutor at the time.
Also, they were probably racist.
After Lamont McIntyre’s defense team revealed this secret to the public, at least eight more women, mostly poor and black, came forward to say that Golubski had forced them to have sex with him. A former FBI investigator eventually issued a report indicating, “The Kansas City, Kan., Police Department (KCKPD) tended to protect the wrongdoers. ... These women complied with his demands because they knew they would be arrested if they said no.”
Twenty-four years later, Judge J. Dexter Burdett, who is accused of having had sex with the woman who prosecuted McIntyre’s case, still sits on the bench as a district judge. Court records show that prosecutor Terra Morehead threatened to take the children away from a witness in McIntyre’s case after the witness told her that McIntyre was not the killer.
Terra Morehead now works as a U.S. attorney.
Meanwhile, Roger Golubski retired after 30 years of service with his full pension. He has not been charged or convicted of his alleged crimes, although the Kansas Bureau of Investigation is looking into the allegations, according to the Kansas City Star.
So how did Kansas lawmakers handle the notion that a corrupt cop had framed an innocent man and extorted black women for sexual favors? How did the state’s powerful politicians decide to address the issue that a judge who should have recused himself from the case sentenced an innocent man to life in prison? How would the legislators compensate the McIntyre family for this terrible tragedy?
They passed a law outlawing cops from having sex with arrestees.
See? They fixed it.