Repeatedly, I have said here that we have a problem with our police departments, not just a race problem. Some have tried to argue that it is "a small number of bad apples," while I have insisted it is a systemic problem.
This is
one illustration of how we know it is systemic. Detroit had more than 11,000 untested rape kits. Cleveland more than 7,000. Memphis more than 12,000. Houston more than 6,000. More than 12,000 in LA. Those are just the cities that shared their numbers. Maryland had 6,000. Georgia's over 10,000. 15,000+ in North Carolina. 9,000+ in TN.
Many states and cities have no inventory, no numbers. Over 200,000 rape kits went untested. All states. Almost all places that had had rape kits had a backlog of untested ones. All levels. Small towns, medium cities, big cities, state police.
Not one year or one period, but ever since the rape kits were introduced. Multiple generations of police.
We have a problem with our police.
Now we have to figure out what to do about it. While bills that require them to do their work, like this, on a piecemeal basis helps, it is not a solution.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/an-epidemic-of-disbelief/592807/An Epidemic of Disbelief
What new research reveals about sexual predators, and why police fail to catch themFrom 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.
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Each year, roughly 125,000 rapes are reported across the United States. 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. Which means that rape—more than murder, more than robbery or assault—is by far the easiest violent crime to get away with.
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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 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.
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Within weeks, DNA results started arriving from the lab: More than a third of the rape kits were pinging in the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, known as CODIS. Created in the 1990s, the database contains DNA profiles collected at crime scenes across the country, many of them linked to the name of a known criminal. Cleveland investigators were soon identifying rapists who had eluded detection for decades. “It was much more fruitful than we ever in our wildest dreams imagined,” recalls DeWine, now the governor of Ohio. Some weeks, Richard Bell, the prosecutor in charge of the task force, would announce 20 new DNA matches.
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Since Cuyahoga County began forklifting its kits, prosecutors have indicted nearly 750 rapists in cold cases and convicted more than 400 of them. (Detroit, which got a later start, has convicted some 175 men.) “They would never have resurrected the [closed cases] without this project,” Bell says.
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