A painful but illuminating report, well worth reading in full, about how police and prosecutors' knee-jerk distrust of rape victims allowed (and still allows) serial rape to continue unchecked.
...In a random sample of cases, mainly from the mid-’90s, they found that the notes from many police investigations barely filled a single page. In 40 percent of cases, detectives never [got back to] the victim. In three out of four, they never interviewed her. Half of the investigations were closed in a week, a quarter in a day. As for rape kits—the one type of evidence that might definitively identify a rapist—police rarely sent them to the lab for testing…
...Eventually 11,341 untested rape kits were found, some dating back more than 30 years—each one a hermetically sealed testament to the most terrifying minutes of a woman’s life, each one holding evidence that had been swabbed or plucked from the most private parts of her body. And in all likelihood, some microscopic part of her assailant—his DNA, his identity—sat in that kit as well.
Or kits.
About 125,000 rapes/year are reported across the US, with 98% of alleged assailants left free. Now tens of thousands of kits tested countrywide are disproving conventional, obstructive myths about sexual predators and victims.
ONE MAJOR FINDING is that serial rapists are far more common than previously thought, a belief that first began to shred under the 2009 discovery of 11 women’s bodies buried around the home of a convicted rapist. Of multiple victims who’d escaped and reported him to police with no thorough investigation following, at least one
had completed a forensic exam. The police had tested the rape kit—but only for drugs in her system, not for the rapist’s DNA.
In 2011, then–Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine (now governor) pressed for Cleveland’s PD to “forklift” all DNA evidence for testing, no matter how old. Results were such that by January 2013 newly elected county prosecutor, Tim McGinty, could set up a dedicated re-investigation task force of 25 mostly retired detectives, a half dozen assistant prosecutors, and 2 Plain Dealer journalists to sit in on weekly meetings, with 1/3 of kit results pinging the FBI’s 1990’s-origin Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) from crime scenes nationwide, many involving known criminals and attacks dating back decades, sometimes 20 new DNA matches a week.
The results showed a pattern DEBUNKING ANOTHER MYTH, that the most vulnerable people —drug addicts, prostitutes, people living in poor neighborhoods, etc make false reports. Turns out they’re the “canaries in the coal mine.” Serial rapists hit them first, escalating to more prosperous, even profitable targets. But a low-status victim who can’t meet the detective’s timetable at police HQ —because she can’t get transportation or child care or time off from work— may be labeled “uncooperative” or written up as unlocatable, the case is closed, the canary silenced. Yet when investigators reopened cold cases even after 20 years, they usually located the victim within hours.
From the moment a woman calls 911 (and it is almost always a woman; male victims rarely report sexual assaults), a rape allegation becomes, at every stage, more likely to slide ... Police may try to discourage the victim from filing a report. If she insists on pursuing a case, it may not be assigned to a detective. If her case is assigned to a detective, it will likely close with little investigation and no arrest. If an arrest is made, the prosecutor may decline to bring charges: no trial, no conviction, no punishment.
ANOTHER MYTH DISPROVED is the notion that rapists aren’t committing other crimes. The 2009 case was one that showed a serial murderer. Kits finally tested identified another example, a predator known to Detroit police for years for robbery and carjacking — his kit trail started with rape of a woman at a bus stop December 26, 2000, another 4 months later, another 3 days after that, a deaf woman in June 2006, another victim in May 2007, one in June 2010, two in August 2011, then December 2011 … He was only caught in January 2012 because that victim
saw [him] two days after the assault and called the police, who arrested him. Eleven years, 11 violent rapes [known] —all while [his] identity was preserved in sealed containers no one had bothered to open.
In 2015, the county prosecutor’s office hired Rachel Lovell’s research team at Case Western Reserve University to go thru’ police records connected to thousands of untested rape kits in Cleveland: they found minimal notes, half the cases closed in a week, a quarter in a day, and kits rarely tested despite funding for labwork. Even when late 90’s/2000s cost dropped from $5,000 to under $1k, police still warehoused kits.
Before Lovell’s research, RAPISTS WERE ‘UNDERSTOOD MOSTLY IN LIGHT OF PRISON RECORDS AND ANONYMOUS SURVEYS FILLED OUT BY CONVICTS self-exculpating and fantasizing, especially along tv and film lines, about signature “styles”, skillful plans, and patterned selectivity as to victim. The research and the kit-processing generated a new class of scientifically objective data —nearly one in five kits pinging at CODIS as serial rape— demonstrating that the only “signatures” are [a] a history of crime and [b] victim accessibility. Instead of the isolated “he said/she said” view of rape, all the same proven presumptions of criminal patterns as for burglary, murder, violence and child-rape turn out to be valid.
The ... research showed that the great majority of rapists are generalists, or “one-man crime waves.”
“They will steal your car, they will steal your watch, and they will steal sex, so to speak, if they can get away with it,” says Neil Malamuth, a psychologist at UCLA. “They are antisocial folks who will commit all sorts of antisocial behavior, including but not limited to sexual aggression.”
In that finding, the fact of 80% of victims knowing the attacker turned out a red herring commonly misinterpreted as isolated, personal attacks, clouding the simple accessibility factor:
...the space between acquaintance rape and stranger rape is not a wall, but a plaza. When Cleveland investigators uploaded the DNA from acquaintance-rape kits, they were surprised by how often the results also matched DNA from unsolved stranger rapes [identifying] dozens of mystery rapists...
Cuyahoga County OH so far has indicted nearly 750 rapists in cold cases and convicted over 400, Detroit —starting later— indicting 480, with some 175 convictions. One, of a former police officer already serving time, connected to 22 kits.
To date, the Obama administration’s 2015-launched Justice Dept Sexual Assault Kit Initiative (SAKI) has awarded $154 million to 54 jurisdictions getting untested kits to labs, re-opening investigations, prosecuting assailants walking free —for years and decades— and identifying their other crimes.
Although the vast majority of SAKI achievement is in Detroit and Cleveland, Angela Williamson, PhD, Senior Policy Advisor, Law Enforcement and Adjudication Team, point of contact (POC) for SAKI sites who’s headed the program since inception, finds results far exceeding expectations, if with much more still to be done — the government estimates over 200,000 untested sexual-assault kits to be in police storage, while the Joyful Heart Foundation —an advocacy group started by Law & Order: Special Victims Unit’s Mariska Hargitay— has located over 225,000 through public-records requests, meaning there may be several hundred thousand more.
It’s uncertain because there’s concealment of numbers: at least 15 states and many large cities decline to count untested kits [perhaps in fear of economic and other repercussions upon their region/jurisdiction].
Although former Cuyahoga County prosecutor Tim McGinty, who created the task force there, thinks
“There is no money better spent than the Justice Department spends here, dollar for dollar … I don’t think there will ever be another time in history when so many criminals can be arrested so easily, so quickly, so inexpensively, and with such certainty.”
[and] “These are not the Napoleons of crime. … They’re morons. We were letting morons beat us.”
still Lovell and Rebecca Campbell a psychologist at Michigan State University’s Research Consortion on Gender-Based Violence —currently training detectives at SAKI sites, and whose 550-page 2015 report autopsied Detroit’s rape-kit scandal— hear officials in some places say they’ll process kits but don’t plan to prosecute anyone identified. Is the point just to create another page in a file? [mettlefatigue speculates the point is to have SAKI grants, in case kit evidence can be useful for other investigations, or to get public opinion off their backs.]
Campbell, Lovell, Cleveland detective Dan Clark —a SAKI trainer nationally— and their colleagues constantly battle entrenched beliefs about women who report rape and men who rape. And there are LEO departments that don’t apply to SAKI at all — which speaks for itself about their beliefs.
Barbara Bradley Hagerty learned of the failure-to-investigate phenomenon from reading a Minneapolis Star-Tribue series that
analyzed police files from nearly 1,500 sexual-assault cases across the state ... closed in 2015 and 2016. “You look through these case files and you see a witness name, and you’re thinking, Okay, they’re going to interview this witness,” recalls Brandon Stahl, one of the reporters. “And they don’t. You see evidence that could be tested or collected—and they don’t do that, either.”
...Even when detectives had the name of the suspect, more often than not, they didn’t question him. In the end, only 9 percent of the cases resulted in a conviction. No doubt, the detectives struggled under a crushing workload. The paper found that sex-crimes detectives juggled three times the caseload of homicide detectives. But these numbers? [MaryJo Webster, who analyzes data for news stories at the paper, said these numbers were so low] that the team kept rechecking its methodology. “We kept thinking, Oh, we’ll get more data, and it’ll be wrong, and we’ll find something different,” she says. “The pattern just held and held and held.”
A retired lieutenant, who’d headed a six-person sex-crimes unit for 400 cases a year, considered the Star-Tribue series a “hit job.”
“...There was never a case—misdemeanor or felony—that I thought was prosecutable that we did not investigate.” Prosecutable is the operative word here. Legally, police are supposed to investigate an allegation based on probable cause, not on whether they think a case can be proved to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s for a prosecutor to decide.*
* The point on which NJ Judge Troiano’s ruling was reversed.
That’s “redlining” — when police shut down an investigation without informing a prosecutor of its existence. The Star-Trib’s Brandon Stahl pointed to a “reverse domino effect”: when prosecutors —especially those elected on the basis of their win score— decline to face juries unless sure of the win, the police think:
Why investigate this case when it will never see a courtroom? “ And that,” Stahl says, “is where the victim is often left out in the cold.”
...and unprotected from being a repeat target if the rapist hears she tried to pursue the case, as one story in Hagerty’s article describes.
It must be an unenviable job for any detective or prosecutor [seeking usable facts of a crime in] which there are usually no witnesses and no evidence except the woman’s word to prove that the sex happened against her will. And, of course, a person can regret sex the next morning; communication between two people can fail; what begins as a consensual act can take an unwanted turn. All of this makes it tricky to prove assault beyond a reasonable doubt.
...WHICH INVOKES THE MYTH CALLED “RIGHTEOUS VICTIM” reported by Cassia Spohn director of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State Univ — and Katharine Tellis, PhD criminologist at California State Univ LA in an exhaustive 2012 analysis of interviews of detectives and prosecutors and read thousands of police reports. Detectives over and over used that term:
A woman who didn’t know her assailant, who fought back, who has a clean record and hadn’t been drinking or offering sex for money or drugs—that woman will be taken seriously. Spohn recalled a typical comment: “ ‘If I had a righteous victim, I would do all that I could to make sure that the suspect was arrested. But most of my victims don’t look like that.’ ”
It takes the perfect crime, the perfect victim, the perfect witness, and the perfect evidence to confront juries of men and women as skeptical as police and prosecutors themselves are.
The lives of surviving disregarded victims across those years vary but at least some are represented in the experience of one working woman raped 3 times during a home invasion assault by the rogue cop later connected to 22 kits. police officer: even after moving, she worried that the rapist would return as threatened to kill her and her daughters, she had multiple daily panic attacks, avoided answering the door, kept lights on all night, slept on the couch with her back to the wall, and knives under her pillow and everywhere in the house. It must have cost her her livelihood and impaired all relationships.The article says that after that rogue cop was identified, she was able to put away the knives. But still sleeps with the lights on.
Hagerty concludes that even if law encorce seems stuck in time, society actually is moving forward:
This moment feels fundamentally different from previous decades, when a sensational rape trial would trigger a surge of outrage and promises of reform, only to see the scandal ebb from consciousness. Too many women have disclosed their #MeToo moments; too many rape kits have been pulled out of storage rooms.
And if the success of the Cleveland task force proves anything, it is this: Rape cases are winnable. Serial rapists could be swept from the streets and untold numbers of women could escape the worst moments of their life, if police and prosecutors would suspend their disbelief.