{"id":21556,"date":"2016-04-05T12:18:15","date_gmt":"2016-04-05T19:18:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=21556"},"modified":"2016-04-05T16:33:34","modified_gmt":"2016-04-05T23:33:34","slug":"no-sexism-by-police-is-not-a-solved-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=21556","title":{"rendered":"No, Sexism By Police Is Not A Solved Problem"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"wiggum\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In response to someone claiming her reports of harassment have been cavalierly dismissed by police, tumblr user Brazenautomaton wrote:<\/p>\n

Crimes with female victims are more likely to be investigated, prosecuted, and result in conviction. Period. Across the board. This is another thing made up by a person whose only knowledge of reality is what feminism says about how the police will never help. (You notice how feminism is the one working hardest to ensure women never report crimes to the police?) Police do not \u201cignore gendered violence.\u201d That can\u2019t even be a matter of opinion or interpretation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, it is true that feminists have been advocating for police to take reports of sexual violence more seriously, and this has led to some improvements – but Brazenautomaton\u2019s claims here are both extreme and unsupported by evidence.<\/p>\n

I’m interested, not in the specific case Brazenautomaton is responding to, ((Honestly, having read the account Brazenautomaton is responding to, I’d agree that skepticism is warranted in that specific case – but that doesn’t justify the sweeping conclusions Brazenautomaton makes.))\u00a0 but in the general principle Brazenautomaton lays out: “Police do not ignore gendered violence. That can\u2019t even be a matter of opinion or interpretation.” I’ve seen people make similar claims before, which makes a general response worthwhile.<\/p>\n

In fact, even with feminist-inspired reforms, there are documented cases – and many, many more cases that can\u2019t be proven – involving police dismissing even rape cases out of hand. (Cases that fall short of rape are even more likely to be treated this way, I\u2019d assume.)<\/p>\n

From the abstract to an article in Iowa Law Review<\/a>:<\/p>\n

During the last two decades, many police departments substantially undercounted reported rapes creating \u201cpaper\u201d reductions in crime. Media investigations in Baltimore, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and St. Louis found that police eliminated rape complaints from official counts because of cultural hostility to rape complaints and to create the illusion of success in fighting violent crime. The undercounting cities used three difficult-to-detect methods to remove rape complaints from official records: designating a complaint as \u201cunfounded\u201d with little or no investigation; classifying an incident as a lesser offense; and, failing to create a written report that a victim made a rape complaint.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here\u2019s<\/a> one rape victims\u2019 description of how police treated her report:<\/p>\n

\u201cThey started making it seem like I had cheated on my boyfriend, got pregnant and wanted to hide it,\u201d \u2026 The woman stopped cooperating, and police classified the case as \u201cunfounded,\u201d meaning they found the woman\u2019s report to be baseless.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Then the man who raped her was arrested for a different rape, and DNA tests proved he had raped her.<\/p>\n

But that woman was lucky compared to this woman<\/a>, who was actually arrested (and basically had her life destroyed) for making a rape report, when police browbeat her until she changed her story.<\/p>\n

[Officer] Rittgarn asked Marie what was going on. Marie said she really had been raped \u2014 and began to cry, saying she was having visions of the man on top of her. She wanted to take a lie detector test. Rittgarn told Marie that if she took the test and failed, she would be booked into jail. What\u2019s more, he would recommend that Project Ladder pull her housing assistance.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Marie\u2019s name was eventually cleared when the man who raped her, who raped at least five other women after the police coerced Marie’s false confession, took photos of the rape. Not a single officer who worked on Marie\u2019s case was ever disciplined.<\/p>\n

The Village Voice showed<\/a>, with secret audio tapes and the testimony of cops, that NYC cops routinely \u201cdowngraded\u201d serious crimes to make their statistics look better – including rape, and including rapes committed by a serial rapist.<\/p>\n

An article from the New York Times<\/a> about a rape case in Florida, involving a star football player:<\/p>\n

As she gave her account to the police, several bruises began to appear, indicating recent trauma. Tests would later find semen on her underwear. \u2026 Aan examination by The New York Times has found that there was virtually no investigation at all, either by the police or the university. \u2026 A lawyer for Mr. Winston\u2019s accuser, said the police investigator who handled the case, Scott Angulo, told her that because Tallahassee was a big football town, her client would be \u201craked over the coals\u201d if she pursued the case.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Another case, combining misogyny and ableism: 15-Year-Old Girl Raped, Police Dismiss the Case Because Victim and Attackers Have \u201cLow IQs\u201d <\/a><\/p>\n

According to the police report, one of the boys repeatedly banged her head against the table while the other two forced her to give them oral sex and then tried to have forcible anal sex with her. In interviews with the police, the girl explained how she repeatedly said \u201cno\u201d and \u201cstop\u201d but that the boys continued to assault her.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The police described this as \u201ca consensual situation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Knowing stories like that should make it impossible to dismiss stories like the ones told in this blog post<\/a> as impossible because \u201cpolice do not ignore gendered violence.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course we can\u2019t know to a certainty if any particular story is true or untrue without investigation or evidence. And in fact, a “true or untrue” framing often isn’t useful, because stories can be subtantively true while still being wrong in specific details (studies have shown that human recollection is extremely flawed). But a blanket dismissal of the very idea that any police are ever misogynistic, or ever dismiss accounts from victims, is ridiculous.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s not even mentioning stories like this<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The Associated Press uncovered about 1,000 officers who lost their badges in a six-year period for rape, sodomy and other sexual assault; sex crimes that included possession of child pornography; or sexual misconduct such as propositioning citizens or having consensual but prohibited on-duty intercourse.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s very likely that some of those 1000 officers (and similar officers who haven’t been caught) have, at times in their careers, had to take rape and harassment reports; do we trust that none of these officers would have been inclined to be dismissive?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In response to someone claiming her reports of harassment have been cavalierly dismissed by police, tumblr user Brazenautomaton wrote: Crimes with female victims are more likely to be investigated, prosecuted, and result in conviction. Period. Across the board. This is … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,96],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prisons-and-justice","category-rape-intimate-violence-related-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21556"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21556\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21560,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21556\/revisions\/21560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}