With last being week being Valentines day I thought it appropriate to comment on several articles that came across my desk with comments from the wife of disgraced cop , racist and Scott Knight favorite (apple doesn't fall far from the tree) Chaska Cop Josh Lawrenze this past week which brought my attention to drew my attention to women who walk along the "blue line” by being married to law enforcement officers and in reading them I've found there’s almost as much "copaganda" pertaining to cops’ wives and girlfriends as there is about cop themselves. Women who date and marry police officers seem to view themselves as being superior to other women, arrogantly basking in the reflected glory of men who dress up in magic costumes that allow them to steal, beat and kill with impunity.
These types of "Ride or die" "I love my cop" chicks have all this loyalty for their spouses but do they get the same in return.
Law Enforcement Today reports:
"We all know that the divorce rate for the nation sits right at about 50%, but did you know that the rate for officers is 60-75%? Staggering numbers when you really consider it. Approximately one quarter of the officers who are married will still be married to that same spouse at the end of their careers. One quarter.”
Alcoholism, is a common issue amongst police officers. From
Police Chief Magazine:
"Law enforcement officers drink in greater quantities and have higher rates of binge drinking compared to non-officers. This drinking is not always off the job—25 percent of officers report having consumed alcohol while on duty."
In a 2011 study, 18.1 percent of male officers and 16 percent of female officers described “adverse consequences” from alcohol use, and 11 percent of male and 16 percent of female officers admitted to engaging in at-risk levels of alcohol use during the previous week. In another recent study, 33.9 percent of law enforcement students indicated excessive alcohol use compared to 26 percent of other students, and, in a study by Peter Weiss, 44.8 percent of the lowest performing officers of the 632 surveyed exhibited “alcohol issues.”
It’s not just the stresses of the job and the tendency of police officers to cope through alcoholism (and other means), that contribute to their higher rates of divorce; Some experts say the personality traits of cops don’t make for good marriages to begin with. :
In The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, John Gottman (You know one of those people with solid facts and research to back up his conclusions) writes, “Statistically speaking, when a man is not willing to share power, there is an 81 percent chance that his marriage will self-destruct.” A police officer's need for control and to feel powerful and desire to be a bully are not generally compatible with normal marital practices.
While it doesn't specifically point out marriages involving law enforcement , a
Daily Beast article on predictors of divorce warns:
If you’re a man with high basal testosterone, you’re 43 percent more likely to get divorced than men with low testosterone levels.
“This is something that evolutionary psychologists and everyday people should take account of,” says Coontz. “Hypermasculinity is neither an evolutionary benefit nor an adaptive trait, especially nowadays, when the best predictor of a successful marriage is not the specialization into two separate roles”—stereotypically male and stereotypically female—”but rather a convergence and a sharing of roles.”
Mazur, Allan. Lanham, MD:
Biosociology of Dominance and Deference, Rowman & Littlefield, 2005, p. 125.
Another embarrassing juicy detail that has gained more attention following the murder of Texas Officer Darren Goforth is the woman who saw him being murdered was actually his mistress. Turns out these types of Badge bunny situations aren't all that uncommon
Local papers report that this "lady of the night" (to put it nicely)
“She then fell into a sexual relationship with Sergeant Craig Clopton, who began investigating that murder, resulting in Clopton getting fired in October.
And now we’re learning "she had a sexual relationship with Harris County sheriff’s deputy Marc DeLeon, who responded to the shooting death of Goforth."
That was an "ongoing relationship that began before Goforth’s murder and continued after his murder. " "DeLeon was fired Wednesday for lying about the affair," according to KHOU.
Now there’s a fourth deputy under investigation who apparently also fell under her sexual charm as some point either before or after the murder, but his name has not been released.”
According to Former Houston Deputy Tom Nixon these types of situations aren't uncommon
“I know it looks like some kind of swingers society, but it really isn’t ,
It’s people who have aggressive personalities who have low inhibition.”
Nixon said it’s not all that uncommon for officers to have sexual relationships with the same women. He said it’s a dirty little secret many don’t know about, but one that has now come to light."
To protect the fragile egos Cops and their wives have turned to memes from sexual predators who target these poor vulnerable law enforcement officers.
You have to give them credit for consistency, even in these situations, society isn't holding Law enforcement accountable for things that are purely their own fault.
Law enforcement officers have a
serious, largely unaddressed domestic violence problem. There is even a term for it, Officer-Involved Domestic Violence (OIDV). Some studies have estimated that the rate of domestic violence amongst police is
two to four times as high as it is for the general population, and the
International Association of Chiefs of Police has even developed a model policy for addressing domestic violence by police officers. here are several examples of how loving the men behind the badge has worked out for some women:
- Colonie, New York police officer Israel Roman used his department-issued handgun to murder his wife, their 10–year-old son on February 9, 2016. He then set their house on fire and killed himself with the same gun. A friend of Deborah Roman’s told reporters that the late Mrs. Roman confided that she felt “oppressed and trapped” in the marriage, and that her police officer husband refused to let her access social media sites like Facebook.
- Officer Joshua Boren of the Linden Police Department in Utah used his department-issued gun to murder his wife, their 7-year-old son and 5-year-old daughter, and his mother-in-law before committing suicide. His wife had just confronted him and threatened to leave him over his repeated incidents of drugging her with Ambien and then videotaping himself raping her after she passed out. In text messages sent the night before her murder, Kelly Boren told her LEO husband, “I hate my life because (of) you,” “You killed a part of me,” and “I don’t want to live in fear and hate and anger.”
- one mysterious case, Officer Luis Monroig of the Naples Police Department in Florida (allegedly) shot his girlfriend, Sergeant Amy Young (with the same department), in the face with his service weapon and then shot himself after a night of drunken arguing on July 9, 2014. Neighbors reported that Young appeared inebriated when she drove herself home that evening, and she tested positive for both alcohol and benzodiazepines (a class of tranquilizers that comes with explicit warnings against mixing them with alcohol), and Monroig also had alcohol in his system.
- There's also Police Officer of the Year,” Drew Peterson, an infamous sergeant with the Bolingbrook Police Department in Illinois. Peterson’s first two marriages were marred by abuse and infidelity, the last two added murder and suspicious disappearance. Peterson is currently serving a 38 year sentence for murdering his third wife, a crime he got away with for years until officials took a closer look at the case following the disappearance of his fourth wife. Peterson is scheduled to stand trial later this month for attempting to arrange a murder for hire on the prosecutor who sent him to prison for killing his wife.
For some former cops’ wives and girlfriends, the stalking, abuse, and murder doesn’t end with divorce or breakup:
- The Chief of the Granger Police Department in Washington, Robert Perales, was recently charged with felony stalking and perjury for harassing a former girlfriend.
- Corporal Edward Huwalt of the Ligonier Borough Police Department in Pennsylvania was fired this week after being charged with making terroristic threats, reckless endangerment and harassment for pointing a gun at his ex-wife’s new husband and threatening to kill him. According to the article, he had previously threatened to kill the man in other incidents going back to 2014.
- Sergeant Phillip Seidle of the Neptune Township Police Department in New Jersey shot and killed his ex-wife, Tamara Seidle on June 16, 2015. When Tamara Seidle crashed her car after being chased by her ex-husband (who had their 7-year-old daughter in the passenger seat of his car), the cop walked over to her car and used his department-issued gun to shoot her several times. Police officers, already at the scene for an unrelated car accident, were able to convince Seidle to release his daughter, at which point they held fire and allowed him to shoot his ex-wife several more times. When Seidle finally surrendered, he received hugs from his compassionate colleagues. One wonders what they said as they comforted the heartless murderer. Was it, “I would have done it, too?”Police wives and girlfriends should watch PBS’ A Death in St. Augustine for a preview of the kind of diligent investigation their romantic partners’ friends and colleagues will likely engage in should they meet an untimely suspicious end. In short Police Officers value their marriages about as much as they value upholding the constitution. No doubt all of this will fall on ears known for selective hearing, Police wives and girlfriends have developed a whole self-identity based on whom they are married to. They are far too invested to entertain the idea that cops are anything other than self-sacrificing heroes and that the biggest risk to their families is not the unknown criminal on the street, but the same man they worry about “making it home at night.”
