What does it take for a cop to lose his job and go to prison?
Jeffrey LaPorto was hired by the Connecticut State Police in 2000 and fired in 2010 after numerous incidents of misconduct, womanizing, and abuses of authority. Here’s what didn’t get him fired:
“LaPorto’s misconduct with the state police included using his patrol car to pull over a woman who had turned him down for a date, driving his state police car to the home of another woman and making sexually suggestive comments to her, and leaving his patrol area to visit a woman with whom he’d had a relationship, according to his state police personnel file.”
Here’s what did get him fired:
“He was fired after being charged with reckless driving in Surfside Beach, S.C., on May 6, 2010. During the course of the arrest, LaPorto ‘belittled’ the South Carolina officers, telling one that he was overweight and that his boots were not highly polished, as required by Connecticut state police, according to the personnel file. LaPorto also told the officers that ‘they better hope they never get stopped by him and that they should never come through Connecticut,’ according to an internal affairs report.”
And here’s what he’s going to prison for:
“brutally raping an 81-year-old woman at a Windsor Locks hotel in June 2014 … the victim was in town to visit her husband, who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease and lived in a nursing home … [a]fter the assault, she said, LaPorto told her that he was a ‘very powerful person’ and not to report the incident.”
His lawyer said “he was prepared to take the case to trial but urged LaPorto to take the deal because it would have been difficult to try a case to a jury with a 43-year-old man claiming consensual sex with an 81-year-old woman who suffered extensive physical injuries during the encounter.” LaPorto got one hell of a plea deal; he’ll serve only two years for violently raping the 81-year-old woman after getting her drunk in a bar.
And although he’ll be on probation for 10 years after getting out, and has to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life, there’s no guarantee those conditions will prevent him from getting another police job — because there’s no national registry of police misconduct cases, and America has nearly 18,000 police agencies, many of which are eager to scoop up experienced street-ready job applicants with little or no background checking — and this makes it easy for bad cops to slide through the cracks and get hired by another police department after being fired.
The Cleveland cop who shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice was such a cop — he failed gun training and was deemed unsuitable for police work by his employer, but within months landed a job with the Cleveland PD just a few miles down the road, and after less than a year with that department he killed a kid playing with a toy gun in a public park.
At least LaPorto won’t be a cop for the next two years.
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Photo: Arrogant cop Jeffrey LaPorto with the family whose lives he destroyed along with his own.