In May, prosecutors in Seattle charged a sheriff's deputy with raping a 17-year-old girl. The deputy met the teenager while he was an adviser in his department's youth mentorship program known as Explorers. Law enforcement departments across the country have Explorer programs overseen by Scouting America, formerly known as Boy Scouts of America " and they have a history of sexual abuse and misconduct. Ride-alongs, in which young people accompany officers on their patrol shifts, are a key perk of the Explorers program. They are also a gateway to abuse. The Marshall Project examined hundreds of abuse allegations in law enforcement Explorer programs and found that about a quarter of them involved officers on ride-alongs with teens " some as young as 14 years old. The Marshall Project reviewed ... the 217 cases currently in our database. The review found that at least a third of the cases involved alleged abuses in an officer's vehicle. More specifically, about a quarter of the cases involved officers grooming, harassing, or sexually assaulting young people during Explorer ride-alongs. A 2003 report by the University of Nebraska at Omaha found that more than 40% of the cases of officers abusing teenage girls that researchers identified nationwide involved police Explorer programs. "And it's just like other types of police crime, we don't see a whole lot of changes as a result of police reforms," [said criminologist Philip Stinson].