2 Los Angeles Police Officers Accused of Repeated Sexual Assaults

By LIAM STACK FEB. 18, 2016

Two officers from the Los Angeles Police Department have been charged with repeatedly sexually assaulting four women over the course of more than two years, prosecutors said on Wednesday.

The officers, James Nichols, 44, and Luis Valenzuela, 43, were each charged with multiple counts of sexual assault, including rape, according to a statement from the office of the Los Angeles County district attorney, Jackie Lacey, on Wednesday.

Prosecutors also charged Mr. Valenzuela with one count of assault with a firearm, accusing him of pointing a gun at one of the victims. The criminal complaint said most of the assaults happened while the officers were on duty and armed and that some took place inside a police vehicle.

 The officers are scheduled to be arraigned on Thursday, and prosecutors said they would ask that bail be set at more than $3.8 million for Mr. Nichols and more than $3.7 million for Mr. Valenzuela. If convicted, both men face a sentence of life in prison.

Prosecutors said the string of attacks began after the two officers were assigned to work as partners in the police department’s Hollywood division in late 2008 and continued into 2011. Some of the victims were assaulted multiple times, prosecutors said. The district attorney’s office declined to provide additional information about the assaults, except to say that the victims were aged 19, 24, 25 and 34 at the time of the attacks and had been arrested for drug­related crimes. “Because of the nature of the charges, we are not commenting further on the facts of the case or evidence,” said Jane Robison, a spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office.

The Los Angeles Police Department said in a statement on Wednesday that the case stemmed from an investigation it conducted into complaints against the two officers, who were longtime veterans of the force. Mr. Nichols was a police officer in Los Angeles for 15 years and Mr. Valenzuela for 18 years, the department said. Both men have been relieved of duty. “I will say again, any officer that abuses the public’s trust is not welcome in the LAPD and we will continue vigorously investigating officers accused of alleged crimes and cooperate fully with the District Attorney’s office,” Charlie Beck, the Los Angeles police chief, said in the statement.

The charges in Los Angeles have echoes of another recent case involving accusations of a police officer assaulting women. In that case, a former Oklahoma City police officer, Daniel Holtzclaw, was convicted in December of raping 13 women while on duty. Prosectors said Mr. Holtzclaw preyed on poor black women with criminal histories whose stories he thought were unlikely to be believed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/18/us/2-los-angeles-police-officers-accused-of-repeated-sexual-assaults.html