He thought his victims wouldn’t speak out

"I FEEL that I'll be able to sleep at night," said Shandegreon Hill, one of 13 Black women who came forward to say that that they were sexually assaulted by Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Holtzclaw.

On January 21, a judge sentenced Holtzclaw, who the women's lawyer Benjamin Crump called "a serial rapist with a badge," to 263 years in prison--a historic sentence for a police officer who preyed on women he believed wouldn't fight back.

"It meant a lot," Jannie Ligons, a 57-year-old day care worker whose call to police after Holtzclaw forced her to perform oral sex following a traffic stop resulted in the cop's arrest, told the Guardian. "I felt very vindicated by the decision. Justice was served for me and victims all over this nation."

Hill said that Holtzclaw assaulted her while she was handcuffed to a hospital bed, and threatened her with jail and a drug charge. She described to the Guardian the feeling of being "speechless and hurt and disgusted and terrified" after she learned during the trial how Holtzclaw targeted his victims.

"[Holtzclaw] took it upon himself to dehumanize and take advantage of us because we seemed vulnerable to him due to our background...I am not my background," Hill said. "The way they tried to portray us doesn't matter. I didn't deserve, and the other women never deserved, the things that officer Daniel Holtzclaw did to us."

The case of the Oklahoma City 13, as their supporters call them, has succeeded in making public the usually hidden everyday abuses by the police--but also the nightmare intersection where the racism and sexism faced by Black women in U.S. society meet.

As Rachel Anspach of the African American Policy Forum (AAPF) at Columbia Law School, which produced the Say Her Name report, noted to the Guardian in November, "It is a sign of progress that Holtzclaw's case has actually gone to trial."

As AAPF founder Kimberlé Crenshaw told Democracy Now!:

[I]t's important to understand this within a broader historical context. If we look at rape overall, Black women are the least likely to be believed. Their cases are the most likely to be thrown out. And when there is a conviction, on the rare occasion that that happens, their assailants get the least number of years.

So we start with just the fact that Black women are generally not believed. You add to that that those victims who have particular kind of backgrounds are also less likely to be believed. You put those two things together, and it becomes a textbook example of what happens to Black women--poor Black women in neighborhoods where generally their expectation of privacy is lessened.

MOST OF the 12 middle-aged Black women--and one 17-year-old girl who Holtzclaw assaulted on the front steps of her mother's porch--were poor and lived in the predominately Black east side of Oklahoma City.

During the month-long trial, the women described an almost identical scenario: the officer, who worked a 4 p.m. to 2 a.m. patrol, stopped them, searched them for drugs and then ran a criminal background check. If they had previous arrests or other encounters with the police, he could then threaten them with arrest if they didn't do what he said.

Holtzclaw's 17-year-old victim said he threatened her with an outstanding warrant for trespassing. "What am I going to do?" she asked. "Call the cops? He was a cop."

Many of the women who said they were assaulted between late 2013 and June 2014, before Ligons made the complaint that led to Holtzclaw's arrest, were too afraid to step forward. "There was nothing that I could do," testified one woman, who said Holtzclaw drove her to a field, raped her in the squad car and then left her in the field. "He was a police officer, and I was a woman."

Holtzclaw was arrested in August 2014, and his bail was reduced from $5 million to $500,000 in September, so he was able to post bond and be released from jail. He wasn't fired from the police force until January 2015.

During the trial--before an all-white jury of four women and eight men--the women Holtzclaw abused were treated like they were criminals. Despite the their descriptions of the distress they suffered as a result of the assaults, Holtzclaw's lawyer Scott Adams interrogated them about using marijuana, drinking, suspended driver's licenses and past arrests, in an effort to discredit them.

"Each and every one of these people have street smarts like you can't even imagine," Adams told the jury at the beginning of the trial.

Meanwhile, the accused rapist was portrayed as a young dedicated police officer and former high school football hero with a bright future.

Several women are pursuing lawsuits against Holtzclaw and the Oklahoma City in civil court. One lawsuit argues that police officials were investigating Holtzclaw as early as May, but he was allowed to remain on regular duty. This means he attacked half of the women he has been convicted of assaulting while he was under investigation for sexual assault.

In fact, the sentence handed down last week--based on Holtzclaw being found guilty on 18 criminal counts of rape, sexual assault and sexual battery raised by eight of the 13 women--reflects only a fraction of the actual charges made against him, which add up to as many as 36.

THE BLACK Lives Matter movement exposed the racist violence that exists in every police force. Similarly, one of the lessons of Oklahoma City is that its cops aren't the only police force with rapists on the payrolls.

According to a report from Associated Press released around the Oklahoma City case, 1,000 officers lost their badges from 2009 through 2014 for rape, sodomy and other sexual assault; sex crimes that included possession of child abuse images; or sexual misconduct such as propositioning citizens or having consensual but prohibited on-duty intercourse. Some 550 officers were fired for sexual assault. About one-third were accused of incidents involving juveniles.

"The number is unquestionably an undercount," reported AP, because it doesn't include states like California and New York, which have large police forces, but have no such records because there's no statewide system to decertify officers for misconduct. "And even among states that provided records," reported AP, "some reported no officers removed for sexual misdeeds even though cases were identified via news stories or court records."

On top of that, the true numbers are hard to find because the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics doesn't track officer arrests, and states aren't required to collect or share that information.

According to AP's findings, sexual misconduct is among the most common types of complaints against law enforcement officers, after violence and profit-motivated crimes.

Incidents cited in the AP report repeat a similar pattern: a police officer, armed with a gun and in a position of power and authority, preys upon those who are the most vulnerable and easily isolated. In Florida, a Broward County Sheriff's Office employee bullied some 20 immigrant men into sex acts. In New Mexico, a Las Cruces police officer sexually assaulted a high school police intern.

IN 1974, Joan Little, a 20-year-old Black woman prisoner was charged with first-degree murder for killing a white prison guard who had attempted to sexually assault her. Little, who fled her cell but later surrendered to police, never denied she killed the guard--who was found stabbed with an ice pick 11 times--nor did she deny her past criminal activities.

She became the center of a defense campaign. Angela Davis wrote in Ms. magazine in 1975:

All people who see themselves as members of the existing community of struggle for justice, equality, and progress have a responsibility to fulfill toward Joan Little. Those of us--women and men--who are Black or people of color must understand the connection between racism and sexism that is so strikingly manifested in her case. Those of us who are white and women must grasp the issue of male supremacy in relationship to the racism and class bias, which complicate and exacerbate it.

In an era of rising struggles for liberation and open criticism of the instruments of power like the police, the Free Joan Little Campaign gained widespread support. A unanimous jury voted to acquit Little.

Today, when the "war on drugs" and the massive expansion of policing has helped spread the tentacles of the racist criminal justice system everywhere, the old argument that "only criminals get in trouble with the police" is more laughable than ever before. The fact that the Black women of Oklahoma City and their supporters forced the courts to do the right thing is a testament to their organizing and the cracks that are breaking open in the way people view the police.

Those who supported the Oklahoma City 13, like the OKC Artists for Justice, alongside those standing up for justice for Black women killed by police such as Rekia Boyd and Sandra Bland, have demonstrated what it looks like to take on the cops and insist that Black Women Matter.

Benjamin Crump, the civil rights lawyer who represents several of the women in their civil lawsuits, said of the ruling, "This is a statement for 400 years of racism, oppression and sexual assault of Black women. A statement of victory not only for the 'OKC 13', but for so many unknown women."