Black Women Sue Kansas Police Department Alleging Rape & ‘Government-Sanctioned Terrorism’

Five Black women filed a federal lawsuit on Friday accusing officers of the Kansas City, Kansas, Police Department (KCKPD) of rape, intimidation, and using “government-sanctioned power and terrorism” to silence and intimidate them. The lawsuit names former police chiefs Thomas Dailey, James Swafford, and Ronald Miller, as well as detectives and former detectives Terry Zeigler, Michael Kill, Clayton Bye, Dennis Ware, and Roger Golubski. Golubski is specifically accused of raping four of the five women.

“With government authority, a plague of State agents used their badges as licenses to stalk, assault, beat, rape, harass, frame, and threaten Black citizens in protected police hunting grounds,” the 138-page lawsuit states.

Golubski, 70, retired in 2010. In addition to this suit, he faces federal charges in two other cases: The former homicide detective is accused of kidnapping and raping two different women, as well as allegedly partnering with drug dealers to run a sex trafficking ring that victimized minors in the 1990s.

In one of the two other cases, Golubski allegedly raped a mother after offering to help her when her two sons were arrested for a double murder in 1999. The victim—who is also one of the five plaintiffs in the new lawsuit against KCKPD—claims that when she told Golubski she would report him, he replied, “Report me to who, the police? I am the police.”

Golubski is also accused of actively working to secure wrongful convictions for several Black men over crimes they didn’t commit, including a 16-year-old Black teenager convicted of doublehomicide in 1984, leading to a 23-year prison sentence. The wrongfully convicted man was exonerated last year.

The women’s lawsuit accuses KCKPD of creating Jim Crow-like conditions to target, exploit, and silence Black citizens in particular. In addition to naming the individual police chiefs and detectives, the suit claims rape, harassment, and violence were so pervasive among the whole force that the women felt they couldn’t report their experiences. Further, the women accuse KCKPD of failing to adequately train, supervise, and discipline members of the force—at the expense of community members’ safety.

The allegations in the suit are reminiscent of the case of Daniel Holtzclaw, the former Oklahoma City police officer convicted in 2016 of sexually assaulting and raping 13 Black women.

“It’s shameful that this is continuing to happen. It’s happening here, it’s happening now, and this sort of systemic corruption leads to the destruction of families and communities,” William Skepnek, an attorney for the plaintiffs, told HuffPost.

Golubski has denied the allegations against him. The KCKPD did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Jezebel.

The suit and the federal charges against Golubski, in particular, show why so few rape victims report their experiences to the police, who are frequently accused of sexual violence themselves. It wasn’t until last March that Congress closed a loophole that had allowed police officers to sexually abuse people in their custody and defend themselves from charges by claiming the encounter was consensual. BuzzFeed News reported that, between 2006 and 2016, at least 26 of 158 law enforcement officers who had been charged with sexually assaulting people they’d detained invoked the “consent defense” and were acquitted or had their charges dropped.