Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/30780
Rape kits await testing in Los Angeles County; at one time, the county’s backlog of untested kits reached more than 12,000. ones. Archambault, a former police officer, explains that police chiefs are a proud group who want to give the ap- pearance of a crime-free city; reporting a smaller number of rapes makes the department look like it’s doing a good job. By reinterpreting what “forcible” means (such as ex- cluding rapes committed on drugged women, which the UCR says it does not leave out—but many police depart- ments do), police can classify some rapes as “non-crimes” or as non-rape sex offenses, thus further lowering the “forcible rape” statistics they submit to the UCR. “[Police] will fudge the numbers to make them look lower, to make it look like they don’t have a problem,” says Archambault. When a city police department underreports rapes, however, there’s a real consequence in terms of federal funding. The U.S. Department of Justice offers grants for local law enforcement based partially on a state’s number of UCR-reported violent crimes—including “forcible” rape—compared to those of other regions. In 2009, the overall funding for these grants was more than $480 mil- lion dollars. States facing rising numbers of rapes receive more federal resources, but if the numbers are underre- ported the needed funding won’t be forthcoming. Ulti- mately, rape victims will pay the price. If a police department keeps the sex-crime rate artificial- ly low to look good in the UCR, local resources will likely be allocated to different crime units within the department. Says Aviva Kurash of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, misclassifying sexual assaults creates “a perception that this is not a real problem, and so resources would not be allocated to training and investigation.” Advocates say funding is needed not just for local law enforcement but for umbrella agencies such as the De- partment of Justice’s Office of Violence Against Women, which provide crucial sex-crimes training for police. That office, Tracy said in her testimony before the Senate com- mittee, helps police “[overcome] the influence of myths and stereotypes [about rape victims] as well as in properly coding and reporting crime to the FBI.” The 2007 Uniform Crime Report listed 91,874 “forcible” rapes, and some believe the numbers are 24 TIMES HIGHER. 28 | SPRING 2011 were it not for enterprising city crime reporters. One of the first groundbreaking investigations appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1998, when reporters Craig McCoy, Michael Matza and Mark Fazlollah revealed that Philadelphia police had been hiding rapes for more than a decade. The scandal dated back to the 1980s, when the FBI reprimanded the city’s police department for a sky-high rate of “unfounded”—meaning unsubstantiated or falsely reported—rape complaints. But it turns out that many of those rape reports were true—police just wanted to make it look as if the city’s crime rate were down. W www.feminist.org E MIGHT NOT KNOW HOW DRAMATICALLY RAPES have been undercounted over the last two decades PATRICIA WILLIAMS