How many rapes could have been prevented if the police had believed the first victim, launched a thorough investigation, and caught the rapist? How many women would have been spared a brutal assault?
…This brick fortress of a building housed evidence that had been collected by the Detroit Police Department. Spada’s visit had been prompted by a question: Why were police sometimes unable to locate crucial evidence? The answer lay in the disarray before him.
As Spada wandered through the warehouse, he made another discovery, one that would help uncover a decades-long scandal, not just in Detroit but across the country. He noticed rows of steel shelving lined with white cardboard boxes, 10 inches tall and a foot wide, stacked six feet high. What are those? he asked a Detroit police officer who was accompanying him. Rape kits, the officer said.
“I’m assuming they’ve been tested?” Spada said.
“Oh, they’ve all been tested.”
Spada pulled out a box and peered inside. The containers were still sealed, indicating that the evidence had never been sent to a lab.
…Eventually 11,341 untested rape kits were found, some dating back more than 30 years.
…Since then, Detroit and other jurisdictions across the country have shipped tens of thousands of kits to labs for testing. The results have upended assumptions about sexual predators—showing, for example, that serial rapists are far more common than many experts had previously believed.
…The deeper problem is a criminal-justice system in which police officers continue to reflexively disbelieve women who say they’ve been raped—even in this age of the #MeToo movement, and even when DNA testing can confirm many allegations. 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 into an investigatory crevice. 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.
…Sometimes the decision to close a case is surely correct; no one wants to smear an innocent man’s reputation or curtail his freedom because of a false report. But in 49 out of every 50 rape cases, the alleged assailant goes free—often, we now know, to assault again.
…If you were raped in Cleveland and you were poor or otherwise vulnerable, police would likely make a couple of phone calls and move on.
…Rarely did a detective visit the victim, witnesses, or the crime scene. If a victim couldn’t come to police headquarters on the detective’s timetable—because she couldn’t find transportation or child care or get time off from work—she was labeled “uncooperative.” The case was closed. In other instances, the detective wrote that he couldn’t locate the victim, and this was enough to end the investigation. Yet when investigators reopened sexual-assault cold cases 20 years later, they almost always found the victim within a few hours.
… In 40 percent of cases, detectives never contacted 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.
…In October 2009, the police discovered the bodies of 11 women buried in the home and backyard of Anthony Sowell, a convicted rapist. Over the years, some of Sowell’s intended victims had escaped and reported his attempts to rape them. But the police had never thoroughly investigated their claims. At least one woman 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.
…Rachel Lovell, the lead researcher at Case Western, reviewed the results of the tests and found herself with a new and superior class of information. In the past, most research on rapists relied on prison records or “self-reports”—that is, surveys of people who answered questions anonymously about their behavior. But here, in her hands, were the biological name tags of thousands of men who had committed a rape and walked away. It was a larger and far more objective sample of sexual offenders. It was the difference between a pencil sketch and a color photograph.
…Of the rape kits containing DNA that generated a CODIS hit, nearly one in five pointed to a serial rapist—giving the Cleveland investigators leads on some 480 serial predators to date. On a practical level, this suggested that every allegation of rape should be investigated as if it might have been committed by a repeat offender. “The way we’ve traditionally thought of sexual assault is this ‘he said, she said’ situation, where they investigate the sexual assault in isolation,” Lovell told me. Instead, detectives should search for other victims or other violent crimes committed nearby, always presuming that a rapist might have attacked before. “We make those assumptions with burglary, with murder, with almost any other crime,” Lovell said, “but not a sexual assault of an adult.”
…Eighty percent of the time, the rapist is someone a woman knows—they met at a party or a bar; he’s her colleague, friend, mentor, coach. So police saw little reason to send off those rape kits: The man’s identity was never in doubt. But the Cleveland study illuminated another insight—one that shows the tragic consequences of failing to test “acquaintance rape” kits. Historically, investigators had assumed that someone who assaults a stranger by the railroad tracks is nothing like the man who assaults his co-worker or his girlfriend. But it turns out that the space between acquaintance rape and stranger rape is not a wall, but a plaza. When Cleveland investigators uploaded the DNA from the acquaintance-rape kits, they were surprised by how often the results also matched DNA from unsolved stranger rapes.
…In 65 percent of the cases, Minneapolis investigators failed to interview the victim. 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.
…After a forensic exam at the hospital, two police officers arrived to take [Mansfield’s] statement. They peppered her with pointed questions; the interaction seemed more like an interrogation than an interview. She read the doubt in the officers’ faces.
….Mansfield assumed they would run a background check on her, as well as on Washington. She was half correct. The officers looked at her record but not his, and sent the report to Lieutenant Michael Sauro, who headed Minneapolis’s sex-crimes unit. …He recalled seeing that she had a prostitution charge on her record. “I’m thinking, Whoa, wait a second here. How much resources am I going to spend if you’re that—how should I say—careless with your own self?” Sauro told me. “So after reading three or four paragraphs, I said, ‘To hell with this. We’re not going to spend any time on this.’
…Had anyone taken 20 minutes to enter Washington’s name into a criminal database, he or she would have seen that Washington was a Level 3 sex offender, considered the most violent and most likely to reoffend. Instead, Sauro “redlined” the investigation, shutting it down without assigning it to a detective. Washington was never interviewed by the police. But he did hear about the allegation, prompting him to threaten Mansfield by phone and text. “It was all day, every day,” she said.
…Months later, Keith Washington was arrested for assaulting two women a few hours apart; he had strangled them and left them unconscious and partially undressed on the street. “If they would have done their job and got him,” Mansfield said, “these other two ladies would have been all right.”
…The lapses in Mansfield’s case didn’t come to light until Washington assaulted the two other women; only then did a detective call her, ask about her assault, and persuade her to testify against him in the other woman’s trial. How many other cases have been closed with little or no investigation and locked away in a filing cabinet, leaving the victims with no answers and no recourse?
…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. But redlining means that police shut down an investigation without informing a prosecutor of its existence, and fail to gather evidence in what might turn out to be a winnable case.
…The skepticism shown by police and prosecutors—who are not juries, after all—is extraordinary. Officials don’t talk about their methods publicly, and rarely reveal their thinking, much less their motives or biases. But two cities—Detroit and Los Angeles—allowed researchers to read thousands of pages of police reports and to interview detectives and prosecutors. What the researchers found is a subterranean river of chauvinism, where the fate of a rape case usually depends on the detective’s or (less often) prosecutor’s view of the victim—not the alleged perpetrator.
…In cases of acquaintance rape, detectives expressed doubt and blamed the women. They spoke skeptically of “party rapes,” in which women drink too much “and make bad choices.”
…In her 2015 report (a 550-page postmortem of Detroit’s rape-kit scandal), detectives often said that women “got what they got” if they knew the man. She asked one detective whether a man can rape an acquaintance. “Truly rape?” he asked. “Sometimes. But not most of the time.”
In some cases, police didn’t believe that sex had occurred at all. Consider this report by a Detroit detective, after a 14-year-old girl claimed she was abducted by two men and raped inside a burned-out house. “This heffer is trippin,” the detective wrote. “She was clean and smellin good, ain’t no way that shit happened like she said … The jig was up.” …That investigation warranted two pages, which ended: “This case is closed: UTEEC.” Unable to establish the elements of the crime.
If detectives blame or disbelieve a woman, their next step is to close the case by persuading her to withdraw the complaint. In Detroit, Campbell says, detectives sometimes opened interviews by noting that the victim would be charged for false reporting if she said anything that was untrue or couldn’t be corroborated. Worried about being prosecuted, the woman would withdraw the allegation, and the officer would walk her to the door. One survivor told Campbell that the entire process seemed aimed at “culling the herd.”
…Sometimes, even a confession is not enough.
…What recourse does a victim have when police or prosecutors refuse to take her seriously? Virtually none, it seems. She can’t force the police to investigate and she can’t make prosecutors try her case, because the state has vast discretion in how it handles criminal cases.
…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.
Why Don’t Police Catch Serial Rapists? – The Atlantic
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