Morgan County Sheriff’s Deputy Donald Steven Fanning was found guilty of domestic violence by strangulation in Feb. 2012. That same month he was fired from his position. But it wasn’t until 2016 that he was decertified, or prevented from ever serving as a police officer again.

“He then grabbed me by my hair on both sides slammed me into door and repeated knocking my head into door…He got on me and had one hand on my throat and one hand pulled back like he was going to hit me and said ’I will f****** kill you myself then I wouldn’t have to worry about you anymore,’” the victim wrote in her voluntary statement to police, in wide, sloping child-like handwriting.

“[He said] ‘I am a cop. I can get away with anything,’” she wrote.

Domestic violence involving law enforcement officers as the abuser has gone largely unstudied. But it happens, and its survivors often face an uphill battle seeking help from the very judicial system in which their abuser plays a role.

Efforts to reach Fanning and the victim in the case by AL.com were unsuccessful.

Between 2003 and 2017, at least 12 officers in the state of Alabama were decertified for domestic violence-related charges, according to documents obtained by USA Today as a part of their officer-involved domestic violence research. AL.com found at least six other cases of officer-involved domestic violence where the charges were dropped by the victim and the officer was never prosecuted.

Fanning was sentenced to two years of probation and completed 20 hours of community service at the Huntsville Botanical Gardens.

“There's been a culture in policing that still, for a lot of people, wants to treat domestic violence like we used to treat it years ago, that we mediated or we ignored it,” Mark Wynn said, a 21-year veteran of the Nashville Metropolitan Police Department and Member of the International Association of Chiefs of Police National Strategic Partnership on Violence Against Women.

In the early ‘90s, two studies highlighted by the National Center for Women & Policing reported 40 percent of responding officers admitted that they had behaved violently toward their spouse at least once during the previous six months. The studies noted victims of police-involved domestic violence are particularly vulnerable because of a police officer’s easily obtained weapon, familiarity of local women’s shelters and knowledge of how to manipulate the system to avoid penalty. “...[E]ven officers who are found guilty of domestic violence are unlikely to be fired, arrested, or referred for prosecution,” the study noted.

There has since been limited research on police-involved domestic violence. But not for a lack of cases that underline its prevalence.

Megan Montgomery

The case of Megan Montgomery, who was killed allegedly by her estranged husband and former police officer Jason McIntosh Nov. 30, illustrates the complexities of officer-involved domestic violence.

McIntosh, a former Birmingham, Mountain Brook and most recently Hoover police officer, was charged with capital murder last week. His estranged wife was found dead in a Mountain Brook parking lot on Dec. 1.

McIntosh resigned from the Hoover Police Department in March after a dispute at the couple’s home in February left Montgomery with a bullet wound in her arm. Prosecutors determined Montgomery to be the aggressor and said she decided not to press charges. McIntosh was placed on leave pending further investigation.

Montgomery filed for divorce in May and the judge issued a dual restraining order against both of them, to prevent them from “harassing, annoying, assaulting, striking, hitting, intimidating, threatening, interfering with, telephoning or in any fashion harming or contacting” each other. The case is listed as “still active.”

Montgomery documented her healing journey, physically and mentally on Facebook and Instagram. She adopted a rescue cat in October and noted the cat’s birthday was the same week as her dispute with McIntosh.

“Maybe she was born on that exact same day,” Montgomery wrote on Facebook. “Maybe it’s God’s way of showing me that the worst day of my life had a silver lining, because Maya was brought into this world that day for me. Can’t help but fight back tears as I type this watching her play with her new toys in her new bed.”

She posted again in November documenting her “all clear” from her doctor and celebrated with a trip to a trampoline park.

“Doc says I’m free to do 100% activity with my arm now,” she wrote. “So I go tumbling at Surge Trampoline Park Birmingham-Homewood ...makes me miss those cheerleading days!!!”

A Statewide Issue

Wynn has trained officers in Alabama, including the Birmingham Police Department, on how to respond to officer involved domestic violence. He said if an officer is on the job long enough they will experience a case involving another officer.

Wynn uses the International Association of Chiefs of Police’s (IACP) policy on how to address officer-involved domestic violence when training police departments. It includes how to address prevention through hiring, warning signs and including higher ranking officers in the investigation.

“[Domestic violence] is not a one time event,” Wynn said. “It's ongoing and it gets worse with time. So there's no margin for error, especially with a police officer suspect, you've got a different kind of offender.”

Wynn said if the same national statistics for domestic violence applies to police families, at least 150,000 police families are dealing with domestic violence nation-wide. “They shouldn't be second class citizens, but sometimes they are,” Wynn said.

A study from Ohio State University in 2011, pointed to abusers use of emotional manipulation as reasoning behind victim’s recanting. “...a victim’s recantation intention was foremost influenced by the perpetrator’s appeals to the victim’s sympathy through descriptions of his suffering from mental and physical problems, intolerable jail conditions, and life without her,” the study explained. “The intention was solidified by the perpetrator’s minimization of the abuse, and the couple invoking images of life without each other.”

In Alabama, those convicted of domestic violence and those under permanent protective orders are prohibited from possessing firearms, excluding dating abusers. But there is no law requiring the removal of firearms from a person subject to domestic violence protection orders.

Ruth Glenn, the president of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, said victims of officer-involved domestic violence often fear they will not be believed because of their partner’s community stature or fear for their life because of their partner’s access to weapons.

According to a study by the National Journal of Public Health, access to a gun makes it five times more likely that the abusive partner will kill his female victim.

“As much as we’d like to believe that we’ve advanced in this society in, particularly here in the United States, there’s still also a great fear of the “Good Old Boys” network, Glenn said. “...a culture in which it’s almost paramilitary in that your brothers at arms, your brothers in uniform—you protect them at all costs because they protect you.”