Cops Raping Women While On Duty — This Time 2 Cops in Los Angeles Stand Accused

By Reuters
Two Los Angeles Police Department officers have been charged with repeated sexual assaults on four women while on duty in their squad car and elsewhere, prosecutors and police said on Wednesday.

The veteran officers, James Nichols, 44, and his partner, Luis Valenzuela, 43, were arrested on Wednesday and were slated to be arraigned on Thursday, with prosecutors expected to ask that bail be set at nearly $4 million for each man, according to the district attorney’s office.

An 18-count criminal complaint filed on Tuesday charges both officers with numerous instances of forcible rape, rape by threat to arrest or deportation, sexual battery and forcible oral copulation, among other offenses.

The complaint says the two were armed during the majority of the alleged assaults and that most occurred while they were on duty. Valenzuela was also charged with one count of assault with a firearm for allegedly pointing a gun at one of the victims.

If convicted, the two men each face a maximum sentence of life in prison, the district attorney’s office said. They have been suspended without pay since 2013, according to police.

The four women, who were not identified, had all been arrested at various times by Nichols and Valenzuela during drug busts, the D.A.’s office said in a statement.

They ranged in age from 19 to 34 at the time of the alleged assaults, which according to prosecutors began in December 2008 and continued through March 2011.

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This is What Wage Discrimination Looks Like: Male Nurses Paid Average of $5,148 More Than Female Nurses

Lydia Monroe of Ringold, Louisiana, a student nurse at Provident Hospital in
Chicago, March 1942. (Public Domain photo provided by OnCall team)

By Eryn Brown and Karen Kaplan
Then Linda Hippolyte first got into nursing, she thought everyone at her hospital was paid based on their experience and education.

But when she got a peek at other nurses’ salaries at Parkview Community Hospital in Riverside, she was in for a surprise.

“You could really see the difference,” she said, noting that male nurses seemed to be making more. “Why was this person who happens to be male making more than this person who is female, with the same experience?”

For nurses, as for nearly everyone else in the U.S. workforce today, it pays to be a man.

Registered nurses who are male earn nearly $11,000 more per year than RNs who are female, new research shows — and only about half of that difference can be explained by factors such as education, work experience and clinical specialty.

That leaves a $5,148 salary gap that essentially discriminates against women, who make up the vast majority of the nursing workforce, according to a study published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn.

Approximately 2.5 million women — and the families they support — are being shortchanged by the gender-based pay difference, said the researchers who conducted the study.

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