Americans have been forced to reckon with sexual abuse committed by teachers, clergy, coaches and others who have access to and authority over children. But there has been little awareness of child sex crimes perpetrated by another profession that many children are taught to respect and obey: law enforcement.
A year-long Washington Post investigation by Jessica Contrera, Jenn Abelson and John Harden found that at least 1,800 state and local police officers have been charged with crimes involving child sexual from 2005 to 2022. Many law enforcement agencies have failed to take basic steps to stop predators with badges.
We wanted to go beyond the numbers, to understand how these crimes happen and who is being hurt by them, how officers are investigated and what their departments do – and don’t do – when these cases come to light.
So we focused on a jaw-dropping case, telling the story of how a New Orleans police officer with a troubled past preyed on a 14-year-old girl. He met her in 2020 when he responded to a report that she’d been raped by a 17-year-old friend. The officer, Rodney Vicknair, accompanied the victim and her mother to the hospital so the teen could get a rape exam. Vicknair began grooming her that day, a process that went on for months.
When the teenager’s mother and therapist realized what was happening and reported his behavior to the police department, officials allowed him to remain on duty for a week. During that week, Vicknair sexually assaulted the teen in his truck.
Vicknair is the sixth officer in New Orleans to be convicted of crimes involving child sex abuse since 2011. To reconstruct what happened in his case, The Post obtained hundreds of internal law enforcement records, hours of video footage and scores of text messages. Contrera also spent hundreds of hours talking to the victim and her mother as well as Vicknair’s relatives and others who knew him.
The story reveals all the systemic failures that allowed Vicknair to abuse a vulnerable teen – a betrayal she will live with for the rest of her life.
