From [HERE] Two New York Police Department officers were fired this year after a disciplinary trial judge found them guilty of engaging in “shocking professional and sexual misconduct” with a teenage girl who was a member of one of the department’s youth programs, departmental records show.

The two former officers, Yaser Shohatee and Sanad Musallam, had sexual contact with the girl, who was 15 at the time of most of the events, the records say, and together exchanged more than 1,500 texts with her over the course of more than a year, some of which included sexually explicit messages.

Among several charges the cops were charged and found guilty of New York Penal Law Section 130.25(2) RAPE IN THE THIRD DEGREE for having non-consensual intercourse with a minor on multiple occasions. [MORE]

The child was interviewed by state prosecutors as part of a sex trafficking investigation, but stopped cooperating, according to a spokesman for the Brooklyn district attorney. Apparently, prosecutors never sought to file criminal charges for raping the teen. Mr. Shohatee, who is now 41, and Mr. Musallam, 34, were not criminally charged, but prosecutors referred their findings to the Police Department’s internal affairs bureau, and the two were tried together.

The department trial judge’s recommendation that the officers be dismissed was handed down in early March, and the two were each terminated three weeks later, records show.

Paul Gamble, the assistant deputy commissioner of trials who presided over the trial, wrote that the two officers “individually targeted the minor as a particularly vulnerable individual they were morally obliged to protect but chose to take advantage of to satisfy their depraved interests.”

The officers’ case was among the hundreds of disciplinary decisions described in previously secret documents that the Police Department began releasing this year. After last year’s mass protests over police brutality, New York lawmakers repealed a decades-old law that kept the discipline records of officers secret.

Since March, the department has published several hundred decisions from its internal trials.

Mr. Shohatee and Mr. Musallam had each been on the job for more than 10 years, records suggest, and had worked in the 68th Precinct, which includes parts of the Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights neighborhoods of Brooklyn.

The bulk of their interactions with the teenager took place after she had become a participant in the department’s Explorers initiative, a program to teach youth about law enforcement, in the fall of 2015, according to the records. [MORE]