
The former Oklahoma City police officer charged with multiple counts of sexual assault, Daniel Holtzclaw, is a former football player, seen here in a 2009 NFL headshot.
Daniel Holtzclaw is a former Oklahoma City police officer now standing trial on 36 counts, including rape, sexual battery and stalking. Twelve women and one 17-year-old girl have come forward, saying Holtzclaw assaulted them while on patrol. Most of the victims were black, poor and embroiled in the criminal justice system for things like prostitution and drug use—a precarious state Holtzclaw allegedly used to threaten and coerce them.
As the 17-year-old put it in her testimony, “What am I going to do? Call the cops? He was a cop.”
The alleged crimes are disturbing; so, too, the evident lack of media interest. Outside of Oklahoma, the case has so far garnered little mainstream attention. A Nexis search indicates neither the New York Times nor Washington Post have printed any original reporting; nor has broadcast network news addressed a story that brings together emergent questions of police violence and rape culture.
An Associated Press investigation showed around 1,000 police officers fired over a six-year period for so-called sex crimes, including rape—certainly an undercount of abusive cops, given that it only includes those who actually lost their badges. The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, which collects data on police, doesn’t track officer arrests, and states aren’t required to collect or share that information.
Holtzclaw evidently selected his victims because he believed no one would care about them. Media shouldn’t prove him right.
Janine Jackson is the program director of FAIR and the host of CounterSpin.





The right victims for the perp
The wrong ones for the press
This man belongs in prison until he is to old to repeat! Victimizing women who are already being victimized by the system is the lowest of low. Not only is it rape it is an abuse of power that reflects badly on all police and demoralizes us all! If we can’t believe in our police who DO we turn to?
This is deeply disturbing. Both the crime and the lack of media coverage.
He was a football player and then a cop. Both jobs are the highest jobs that are connected to people who abuse their spouse/ other people.
All of law enforcement is of the upper half of society, the half that owns all the wealth. On the other hand, all prisoners in the jails and prisons of Empire USA, they are of the lower half, the impoverished laboring-class. For 99% of our prisoners are laboring men and they total a forth of all the prisoners on earth.
Praying for those victims…wow. We think that police are somehow above the law.
As the Mayer of Chicago has warned black protesters that they will be arrested if they commit a crime, what if in lawful self-defense the protesters all strapped a sharp hunting knife to their belt and wore a T-shirt with big bold letters saying: “I will fight to the death if a criminal cop tries to arrest me for doing a lawful thing”?
For the law of the land is shoot to kill any black that shows contempt toward the legalized killers that spend 95% of their time enforcing a police state upon them.. For young black men wearing a hunting knife, that I predict would reduce the legalized murder of young blacks by at least 50%, maybe even 95%
So we’re to believe drug addicted prostitutes with no actual evidence ? I’m black and I know this stinks..