Rape And Wrong: The Cop Problem

Ken Armstrong and T. Christian Miller* start their op-ed with the dreaded formulaic anecdote designed to make you feel the pain. The story is of a rape victim who was not believed, and subsequently prosecuted for falsely reporting. And it turned out she was telling the truth. And she wasn’t the only one.

What happened to Marie seemed unthinkable. She was victimized twice — first raped, then prosecuted. But cases like hers can be found around the country. In 1997, a legally blind woman reported being raped at knife point in Madison, Wis. That same year, a pregnant 16-year-old reported being raped in New York City. In 2004, a 19-year-old reported being sexually assaulted at gunpoint in Cranberry Township, Pa.

In all three instances, the women were charged with lying. In all three instances, their reports turned out to be true. The men who raped them were later identified and convicted.

There are two ways to see this problem. One is that the police who investigated their allegations failed to do their job. Indeed, the cops not only blew it, but blew it twice. They blow rape investigations. Murder investigations. Drugs, assaults, robberies and every other kind of investigation, from time to time, sometimes with deadly consequences for the innocent or not-so-guilty-as-to-deserve-to-die.

Or the other way, that cops doing a lousy job, then compounding it by doing harm to the victim, is exclusively a rape problem because cops are otherwise wonderful, brilliant, dedicated and flawless in the performance of their duties. But Armstrong and Miller wield the rape hammer, so the problem is the rape nail.

Nationally, police departments, victim advocates and academics have experimented with ways to relieve the burden on rape victims who might fear dismissal, or even arrest, by reporting their attacks to the police. Perhaps the most influential campaign to change police procedures is known as Start by Believing, sponsored by End Violence Against Women International, an organization that conducts training for the police and victim advocates. The campaign asks participants to make a simple pledge: Start the process of investigation by believing those who come forward.

Is fear of reprisal a significant influence on reporting rape? So the narrative goes, not that Armstrong and Miller have made a case to show it. There are the stats, how many complaints of rape result in prosecutions of the complainant for falsely reporting, but that won’t tell us who didn’t report a crime or why. The narrative also claims the false reports are negligible, though this too is an abuse of stats by the unwashed. It’s another number we’ll never really know for a variety of reasons.

But even if we never know the frequency of false complaints, and wrongful prosecutions of false complainants, and the influence this has on other complainants coming forward, the myopia of breaking this down by offense, as if cops are worse with rape than robbery or murder, is still a matter of mindless narrative. As proof, Armstrong and Miller made their pitch at the Marshall Project, where thought has been replaced by tears.

Yet, they present this as a rape problem, a woman problem, because that’s the limit of their concern. And so, proffer solutions geared exclusively to their special nail:

The campaign asks participants to make a simple pledge: Start the process of investigation by believing those who come forward.

First comes the irony. Cops swear to uphold the law, but they should now make an additional “simple” pledge that may be in direct conflict with their oath: Believe the victim. Believe the litany of excuses for the dubious issues, the same ones that arise in all manner of crime, because the narrative is that women are different and special. Rape is different and special. So different and special rules should apply, but only to women and only to rape.

Second comes the wrong answer to the wrong problem. They don’t propose to believe the facts, conduct a serious investigation, do their jobs better. Are Armstrong and Miller aware of how many murders go unsolved? How many robberies never result in an investigation, no less an arrest? How many crime victims get the shuffle out the door?

But then, they aren’t looking at the right problem, the failure of police to take complaints of crime seriously, their disinterest in solving crime, their lack of concern for victims of all types of crime. No, they are focused on rape, so they are blinded to the real problem and manufacture a special and different problem that rationalizes away the special and different issues promoted by a false narrative.

This, in turn, fabricates the litany of excuses that justifies the wrong answer. If a rape, in fact, occurred, then there is no excuse for the police to not only fail to investigate it and present it for prosecution. And there is no excuse for police to prosecute the complainant instead. This is true for rape. This is true for murder, for robbery, for arson, and for every other crime.

And if the complainant is lying, and the allegation of rape is false, then the police should do their job as well. The notion that police should believe lies makes no more sense than ignoring truth. The notion that a victim of a rape, or any crime, should not be taken seriously if the facts support the allegations is just as wrong as the notion that the police should believe lies and promote the prosecution of innocent men.

Indeed, our jurisprudence is grounded in the premise of Blackstone’s Ratio, even when it comes to rape. Even though it’s in conflict with the deepest feelings of the staunchest feminist ally.

You Have Options is an even tougher sell. Many police officers are instinctively resistant to the idea of not immediately investigating a rape. Their job, after all, is to catch bad guys, not let them get away.

The police aren’t the Women’s Rape Therapy Hotline. Rather than grasp what the police exist to do, “to catch bad guys,” rather than push for them to do their job better, you not only want them to believe lies, but to sit there and emote with the fragile but reluctant. That’s not why we have cops. And changing the nature of law enforcement so that they’re dedicated to the cause of women’s feelings ignores that there are murders and robberies happening as well. We’ll just have the cops stop investigating murders while they sit there listening to women share their feelings about a crime they don’t want the cops to investigate.

Here’s an alternative idea that will eliminate the problem: there is no reason a woman should be reluctant to report a rape. There is no shame in being the victim of a crime. Report it. Report it immediately. Get a rapist off the street. And cops should do their job better for all crimes, including rape. If the facts support a charge, then arrest the rapist. And murderer and robber too. And if the facts show that the complaint is false, the arrest the person lying to the cops.

The system is flawed, and mistakes happen, but they happen for all crimes. The solution to a flawed, lazy, inadequate system is to expect and demand a better system for everyone. Women aren’t special. And rape isn’t the problem, even if you only stare into the abyss.

  • Armstrong and Miller won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in a joint ProPublica and Marshall Project effort in “An Unbelievable Story of Rape,” which tells the story of Marie, the anecdote relied upon at the top of their op-ed. Armstrong won the Pulitzer in 2012 for Investigative Reporting, and shared Pulitzers for breaking news in 2010 and 2015. I, on the other hand, have never won a Pulitzer Prize.

8 thoughts on “Rape And Wrong: The Cop Problem

  1. James L. Smith

    But damned if you don’t deliver prodigiously, and with such pizzazz. And if I couldn’t devour this writing with my breakfast, life might not be all that bearable.

    And the cops, yes, so many bad ones and we have our share of them here.

  2. B. McLeod

    Just another retread of “believe the victim.” Not that this isn’t repeatedly injected into every case by anointing complainants “victims”. But it has no basis in sound investigative technique. The way to commence an investigation is to look for facts and figure out what they add up to. Starting instead with stock presumptions simply reduces the exercise from an “investigation” to a display of confirmation bias.

  3. Igor Kaplunov

    One big thing that is ignored by people who advocate “believing the victim” is what incentives that kind of approach creates. If if there aren’t “that many” false rape accusations there certainly will be if we implement this kind of stance. It’s the trolley problem in essence but somehow there are plenty of people out there who will tell you that if a judicial trolley ran over someone they clearly must have “done something wrong”.

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