If domestic abuse is one of the most underreported crimes, domestic abuse by police officers is virtually an invisible one. It is frighteningly difficult to track or prevent—and it has escaped America’s most recent awakening to the many ways in which some police misuse their considerable powers. Very few people in the United States understand what really happens when an officer is accused of harassing, stalking, or assaulting a partner. One person who knows more than most is a 62-year-old retired cop named Mark Wynn.

Wynn decided to be a police officer when he was about 5 years old because he wanted to put his stepfather in prison. Alvin Griffin was a violent alcoholic who terrorized Wynn’s mother, a waitress and supermarket butcher. Looking back, Wynn compares his childhood in Dallas to living inside a crime scene. “There was always blood in my house,” he said.

The cops sometimes showed up, usually after a neighbor called to complain about the screaming, but they didn’t do much. Wynn doesn’t remember them ever talking to him or his four siblings. He does remember clinging to his mother while a police officer threatened to arrest her if they had to come back to the house again. “There was no one to help us,” he said. “We were completely isolated.” Wynn has often spoken of the time he tried to kill his stepfather when he was 7—how he and his brother emptied out the Mad Dog wine on Griffin’s bedside dresser and replaced it with Black Flag bug spray. A few hours later, Griffin downed the bottle as the boys waited in the living room. Griffin didn’t seem to notice anything wrong with the wine. But he didn’t die, either.

Years later, when Wynn was around 13 and all but one of his siblings had left home, he was watching television when he heard a loud crack that sounded like a gunshot. He found his mother splayed on the floor of their tiny kitchen, blood pooling around her face. Griffin had knocked her out with a punch to the head. Wynn watched as Griffin stepped over her, opened the fridge, pulled out a can of beer and drank it. That night, Griffin got locked up for public drunkenness and Wynn, his sister and his mother finally got out, driving to Tennessee with a few belongings. Griffin never found them.

Mark Wynn with his stepfather, Alvin Griffin, in 1961. COURTESY OF MARK WYNN

Wynn became a police officer in the late 1970s and after a few years, he wound up in Nashville. Then as now, domestic complaints tended to be one of the most common calls fielded by police. And Wynn was disturbed to find that he was expected to handle them in much the same way as the cops from his childhood had—treat it as a family matter, don’t get involved. He remembers that officers would write cursory summaries on 3 by 5 inch “miscellaneous incident” cards rather than full reports. To fit what he regarded as essential details in the tiny space provided, Wynn would print “really, really small,” he said. “The officers I worked with used to get pissed off at me,” he added. They couldn’t understand why he bothered.

But Wynn had entered the force at a pivotal moment. In the late 1970s, women’s groups had turned domestic violence into a major national cause, and abused women successfully sued police departments for failing to protect them. Over the next decade, states passed legislation empowering police to make arrests in domestic incidents and to enforce protective orders. Wynn eagerly embraced these changes and in the late 1980s, the Department of Justice asked him to train police chiefs on best practices. He went on to lead one of the country’s first specialized investigative units for family violence. By the passage of the 1994 Violence Against Women Act, which poured more than $1 billion into shelters and law enforcement training, the U.S. was finally starting to treat domestic violence as a crime. “It was like stepping out of the Dark Ages,” Wynn said.

And yet when officers themselves were the accused, cases tended to be handled in the old way. Wynn would hear stories around his station, like an assailant who received a quiet talk from a colleague instead of being arrested. “Officers thought they were taking care of their fellow officer,” said David Thomas, a former police officer and a consultant for the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP). “But what they were doing was colluding with a criminal.”

It is nearly impossible to calculate the frequency of domestic crimes committed by police—not least because victims are often reluctant to seek help from their abuser’s colleagues. Another complication is the 1996 Lautenberg Amendment, a federal law that prohibits anyone convicted of misdemeanor domestic abuse from owning a gun. The amendment is a valuable protection for most women. But a police officer who can’t use a gun can’t work—and so reporting him may risk the family’s livelihood as well as the abuser’s anger. Courts can be perilous to navigate, too, since police intimately understand their workings and often have relationships with prosecutors and judges. Police are also some of the only people who know the confidential locations of shelters. Diane Wetendorf, a domestic violence counselor who wrote a handbook for women whose abusers work in law enforcement, believes they are among the most vulnerable victims in the country.

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In 1991, a researcher at Arizona State University testified to a congressional committee about a survey she’d conducted of more than 700 police officers. Forty percent admitted that they had “behaved violently against their spouse and children” in the past six months (although the study didn’t define “violence.”) In a 1992 survey of 385 male officers, 28 percent admitted to acts of physical aggression against a spouse in the last year—including pushing, kicking, hitting, strangling and using a knife or gun. Both studies cautioned that the real numbers could be even higher; there has been startlingly little research since.  

Even counting arrests of officers for domestic crimes is no simple undertaking, because there are no government statistics. Jonathan Blanks, a Cato Institute researcher who publishes a daily roundup of police misconduct, said that in the thousands of news reports he has compiled, domestic violence is “the most common violent crime for which police officers are arrested.” And yet most of the arrested officers appear to keep their jobs.

Philip Stinson, an associate professor of criminal justice at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, uses an elaborate set of Google news alerts to identify arrests of law enforcement personnel and then attempts to track the outcome through news reports and court records. Between 2005 and 2012, he found 1,143 cases in which an officer was arrested for a crime of domestic violence. While he emphasized that his data is incomplete, he discovered convictions in only 30 percent of the cases. In 38 percent, officers either resigned or were fired and in 17 percent, he found no evidence of adverse consequences at all. Stinson noted that it wasn’t uncommon for police to be extended a “professional courtesy” in the form of a lesser charge that might help them avoid the Lautenberg Amendment. Officers could be booked for disorderly conduct instead of domestic assault. If they were charged with domestic violence, the prosecutor might allow them to plead to a different offense. Stinson has identified dozens of officers who are still working even after being convicted.

Through public records requests, we also obtained hundreds of internal domestic abuse complaints made about police officers between 2014 and 2016 in 8 of the 10 largest cities in the country. Officers can be penalized internally whether or not criminal charges are filed—although the penalties may be minor and many complaints are not substantiated. An ABC 7 investigation this February found that nine of every 10 domestic violence allegations made against Chicago police officers by spouses or children resulted in no disciplinary action.

What is striking in many of the internal complaints, as well as incidents we found in news reports, is the degree of alleged violence and how often it appears to coincide with the misuse of police authority. An officer in New Jersey was indicted in January after he allegedly used his identification to enter the hotel room of a woman he was dating, fired a gun in her direction, assaulted her to get her to recant a statement, and attacked an officer who was working with investigators. He pleaded not guilty. So did a veteran Cleveland officer who was arrested the same month for allegedly beating his girlfriend with his service gun, firing shots near her head, then sexually assaulting her at gunpoint. Last September, an officer in Indiana was arrested for assaulting his ex-girlfriend for years—after previously alleging that she had abused him. (The case has not yet gone to trial.) And in 2013, a San Antonio police officer allegedly hit his wife with a gun and pointed it at his children. He ultimately pleaded no-contest to “making an obscene gesture.” Because he was not convicted of a domestic violence offense, he kept his officer’s license.

Despite the scarcity of data, the IACP has acknowledged that domestic violence is likely “at least” as prevalent within police families as in the general population. Which is significant: One third of women are estimated to experience sexual or physical violence or stalking by a partner during their lifetime. This is why, since the late 1990s, Wynn has focused on exposing the problem of abusive officers and persuading police departments to address it. As he sees it, the issue triggers every possible defensive instinct a cop might possess: romantic, protective, fraternal, tribal: “It’s the last frontier of policing.”

On a dreary Friday earlier this year, Mark Wynn was pacing in front of a group of police officers and prosecutors in a hotel ballroom in Portland, Oregon. He’d warmed up the audience with a few well-worn jokes in his mellow drawl, and now he was getting to the tricky part. “This can be kinda weird. Stay with me now,” he said. “This, in my mind, is who people of policing are.” He reeled off a list of characteristics that officers are encouraged to master—to control their emotions, to interrogate when suspicious, to match aggression when challenged, to dominate when threatened. These hard-won habits were “a good thing,” he reassured the group. But they could also “super-charge” abusive officers. “You got an offender in the ranks—man, you got a mess on your hands,” he concluded. “Because they now are using what you gave them to be a better abuser, no question about it.”

Police officers can find their instincts hard to turn off when they leave the station—a phenomenon known as “authoritarian spillover.” Seth Stoughton, an assistant professor of law at the University of South Carolina, still finds himself slipping into “cop mode,” although he hasn’t been a police officer in more than a decade. When he was still on the force, Stoughton once became convinced his wife was lying about a big scratch on their car. “Let me be clear, I interrogated her using a number of the techniques I had learned as a cop,” he said. “It was not a good scene.” It also turned out that he was wrong, and to this day, the memory makes him uneasy. (His wife, Alisa, said she “felt very attacked and uncomfortable. I had never seen that side of Seth before.”)

Because police are trained to use a continuum of force that starts with non-physical tactics and ends with lethal violence, behavior that seems routine to them can be terrifying for family members. Punching or grappling, for instance, might only rank a 5 or a 6 on the use-of-force scale, wrote Ellen Kirschman in a book for law enforcement families called I Love A Cop. But for family, yelling might feel like a four and pushing could be a 7. One study of more than 1,000 Baltimore police officers found that officers with stronger authoritarian attitudes—such as a need for “unquestioning obedience”—were more likely to be violent toward a partner.  

Since the late 1990s, Mark Wynn has focused on exposing the problem of abusive police officers. Courtesy of Mark Wynn

Wynn is careful to emphasize that police work doesn’t turn people into abusers. He has come to believe that the most dangerous offenders are those who enter the force with abusive tendencies, which are intensified by the job and the power that comes with it. Officers learn “command presence”—how to control a situation by physically and verbally projecting strength. They are taught to dominate suspects with precise techniques like digging into a pressure point or locking a wrist. They possess access to databases and other resources that can be used to facilitate abuse—license plate data, for instance, could be used to closely monitor a person’s travel patterns. They may even be capable of locating a person if she changes her name or social security number. An abusive police officer, said David Thomas, the IACP consultant, is “a master manipulator with a Ph.D.”

“So the question is, ‘Do we break the code?’” Wynn asked his audience. Over the years, he’d come across numerous cases of officers protecting their own—arriving at court in uniform to intimidate a victim, driving by the house of a colleague’s wife to report on her movements. But the urge to shelter a fellow officer, he cautioned, isn’t necessarily sinister. He recalled once assigning a detective to investigate abuse allegations against a colleague. The detective looked at the file and blanched: The officer in question had saved his life, twice. Wynn knew what that meant. He put another detective on the case.

One potential solution is to establish a mandatory procedure to be followed when an officer is accused of abuse, covering everyone from the responding officer to the chief. “You cannot treat this case like any other case,” said Wynn, who has been lobbying police chiefs since 1999 to adopt a policy developed by the IACP. And yet most departments don’t have such a protocol. (The Delaware State Police wouldn’t comment on whether it has one.) Ultimately, Wynn believes that the most effective solution of all is to screen prospective police officers for any history of domestic violence or sexual misconduct. He also advises departments to check whether they have protective orders anywhere they’ve lived or worked. Still, many of the chiefs Wynn talks to remain skeptical of his proposals, he said: “They say, ‘Oh, that doesn’t happen here. We’ve never had that problem.’”