When Sexual Exploitation Is Fundamental to Police Corruption

None of this will be shocking to anyone who’s lived in an American city crippled by disinvestment and self-dealing—or even to anyone who’s watched a David Simon show on HBO. Even so, having it all laid out is bracing, and Tulsky’s book makes for a worthy entry in the canon of American injustice. Beyond individual bad actors, there is a system with many flawed elements, including the fact that Wyandotte County was the rare urban jurisdiction that, until recently, didn’t have a public defender’s office. But, parallel to the standard story of corruption and false imprisonment, another narrative emerges from “Injustice Town,” one that never fully comes to the forefront.

Centurion took up McIntyre’s case in 2009, and Pilate was tasked with investigating the case and putting together the legal documents petitioning for his release. The work, which was initially supposed to be completed in a year or two, took much longer than expected. “Injustice Town” has a light touch with its do-gooders, but it’s clear that the delay frustrated McCloskey, Centurion’s founder, and weighed heavily on McIntyre, who had spent more than half his life behind bars. The delays occurred, in part, because Pilate had become preoccupied with amassing evidence about Roger Golubski that was beyond the scope of McIntyre’s case. Born into a working-class family, Golubski was a heavyset man who had considered becoming a priest before entering the police force. Among his colleagues, he was known to be well sourced, with an extensive network of confidential informants who helped him close cases. Among Black residents of the neighborhoods Golubski patrolled, he had a different reputation.

Ophelia Williams encountered Golubski in 1999, when he was investigating her twin sons for murder. According to Williams, while Golubski was at her home, he put his hand on her leg. She slapped it away. He told her he was friends with the D.A. and might be able to help her sons, and then put his hand up her skirt. Then he raped her. Golubski would return and assault Williams several more times in the following months. Usually, he was on duty, driving his official vehicle. On two occasions, he was particularly rushed; he told her that his partner was waiting in the squad car outside. Williams didn’t report him at the time. “He was the police,” she said later. “What was I going to say; this policeman just raped me?”

Compared with the extensive coverage of police violence in recent years, there’s been relatively little discussion of sexual exploitation by law enforcement. In 2015, the Associated Press published a report that said nearly a thousand police officers in the U.S. lost their licenses as a result of sexual misconduct between 2009 and 2014—a figure that represented a “sure undercount,” the report noted, since nine states, including New York and California, didn’t keep relevant records. Women engaging in drug use and sex work are particularly vulnerable. When researchers recruited three hundred and eighteen women from St. Louis drug courts for a study on H.I.V. intervention, seventy-eight of them disclosed having experienced police sexual misconduct, defined by some researchers as a “sexually degrading, humiliating, violating, damaging, or threatening act committed by a police officer through the use of force or police authority.” Of more than three hundred sex workers in Baltimore interviewed for a 2023 study, roughly a third reported recent sex with police, including situations that ranged from paid sex work to implicit or explicitly coercive encounters and violent assaults. In some instances, the interaction may have a veneer of consent, or of quid pro quo. (In the Baltimore study, a number of women said that they were pressured into sex as a way to avoid arrest; forty-four per cent of them were arrested anyway.) Victims are not exclusively female: in 2015, a Florida officer pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting undocumented men while on duty. Numerous officers fired for sex offenses have been hired elsewhere and continued to work in law enforcement, sometimes re-offending, according to the A.P. In 2023, the Department of Justice established the first nationwide database documenting instances of police misconduct. On the first day of the second Trump Administration, it was eliminated.

Pilate’s sources told her that Golubski frequented sex workers in his patrol area while on duty, stole drugs from dealers and provided them to women in exchange for sex, and was reputed to have had multiple children with women in the area. The confidential informants who helped him close cases so swiftly included women he had sexual relationships with, some of whom were addicted to drugs. He threatened to arrest women if they refused sex. Golubski’s predatory behavior seemed to have been not so much an open secret as just open. Ruby Ellington, the first Black woman to work as a police officer in K.C.K., was in the same police-academy class as Golubski. In a 2015 affidavit, she said that Golubski used his badge as “leverage to get what he wanted,” and that his exploitation of Black women was “no secret”: “Everyone in the Department knew that when Golubski would go out on calls, that any black female involved would likely end up in his police car with him.” Several other officers shared similar stories; one Black officer said that the higher-ups thought that Golubski’s predilections were “funny.” (Golubski’s superiors admitted to knowing something about what one described as his “affinity” for Black women, but denied knowledge of rampant sexual exploitation, and said that there were no complaints filed against him.)