Florida police appear to bury comments about a botched rape investigation (www.motherjones.com)

submitted 1 month ago by octopus_ink@lemmy.ml to c/thepoliceproblem@lemmy.world

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/25217449

In 2016, a 12-year-old named Taylor Cadle reported to the Polk County Sheriff’s Office, in central Florida, that she had been raped by her adoptive father. The detective investigating the case didn’t believe her, and Taylor was charged with filing a false police report, a first-degree misdemeanor. As part of the terms of her probation, she was required to write an apology letter to her adoptive father. Soon after, he abused Taylor again—and this time, Taylor took photos and video of the incident on her phone. Taylor’s evidence led to her adoptive father ultimately getting sentenced to 17 years in prison.

But, as Rachel de Leon and I detailed in an investigation last fall, the fallout from the case was minimal: Sheriff Grady Judd, a charismatic, tough-on-crime influencer with more than 780,000 TikTok followers, never apologized to Taylor or acknowledged the case publicly—despite his often-repeated phrase, “If you mess up, then dress up, fess up, and fix it up.” When we published our piece, the detective investigating the case, Melissa Turnage, was still on track to become sergeant. (After the story came out, she was required to complete a weeklong online course on interrogation techniques.)

The Center for Investigative Reporting’s story, which aired on PBS NewsHour and published in Mother Jones, led commenters to flood the sheriff’s office’s TikTok and Instagram pages with comments demanding justice for Taylor. But soon after being posted, many of those comments mysteriously disappeared from view, prompting more anger.

Screenshots from TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram appear to show the sheriff’s office has been routinely filtering out comments criticizing its handling of the case. Recently deleted comments suggest that it is automatically removing comments that include the word “Taylor” from public view.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20250206124703/https://www.motherjones.com/criminal-justice/2025/02/taylor-cadle-grady-judd-polk-county-sheriff-florida-rape/

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this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2025

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THE POLICE PROBLEM

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The police problem is that police are policed by the police. Cops are accountable only to other cops, which is no accountability at all.

99.9999% of police brutality, corruption, and misconduct is never investigated, never punished, never makes the news, so it's not on this page.

When cops are caught breaking the law, they're investigated by other cops. Details are kept quiet, the officers' names are withheld from public knowledge, and what info is eventually released is only what police choose to release — often nothing at all.

When police are fired — which is all too rare — they leave with 'law enforcement experience' and can easily find work in another police department nearby. It's called "Wandering Cops."

When police testify under oath, they lie so frequently that cops themselves have a joking term for it: "testilying." Yet it's almost unheard of for police to be punished or prosecuted for perjury.

Cops can and do get away with lawlessness, because cops protect other cops. If they don't, they aren't cops for long.

The legal doctrine of "qualified immunity" renders police officers invulnerable to lawsuits for almost anything they do. In practice, getting past 'qualified immunity' is so unlikely, it makes headlines when it happens.

All this is a path to a police state.

In a free society, police must always be under serious and skeptical public oversight, with non-cops and non-cronies in charge, issuing genuine punishment when warranted.

Police who break the law must be prosecuted like anyone else, promptly fired if guilty, and barred from ever working in law-enforcement again.

That's the solution.

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