The Senate Judiciary Committee will hear testimony today that many police departments in cities around the country fail to take reports on and investigate many rape cases. This leads to an underreporting of rape in national statistics, and, as Carol Tracy said on NPR this morning, when more than one city is doing it, it's a systemic problem.
In Baltimore, a Sun report showed that police officers often failed to take rape reports when they were reported on the street, and that as many as 30 percent of rape claims were "unfounded," which means officers found no basis for the claim. After a change in policy that required officers to take the reports, or to justify why a reported rape isn't ultimately classified as such, rape reports went up 20 percent.
This just highlights how meaningless the scare over false allegations of rape, illustrated by a few high-profile incidents, really are. While those cases, like that against the Duke lacrosse team in 2006, are no doubt traumatic for everyone involved, the truth is many more women decline to report rape, or have their reports go unheeded and un-investigated, than not.
-- Monica Potts
