How to Lie with Rape Statistics: America's Hidden Rape Crisis

• Author: Corey Rayburn Yung
• Position: Associate Professor, University of Kansas School of Law
• Pages: 1197-1256

How to Lie with Rape Statistics: America’s Hidden Rape Crisis Corey Rayburn Yung  ABSTRACT: During the last two decades, many police departments substantially undercounted reported rapes creating “paper” 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 “unfounded” 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. This study addresses how widespread the practice of undercounting rape is in police departments across the country. Because identifying fraudulent and incorrect data is essentially the task of distinguishing highly unusual data patterns, I apply a statistical outlier detection technique to determine which jurisdictions have substantial anomalies in their data. Using this novel method to determine if other municipalities likely failed to report the true number of rape complaints made, I find significant undercounting of rape incidents by police departments across the country. The results indicate that approximately 22% of the 210 studied police departments responsible for populations of at least 100,000 persons have substantial statistical irregularities in their rape data indicating considerable undercounting from 1995 to 2012. Notably, the number of undercounting jurisdictions has increased by over 61% during the eighteen years studied.  Associate Professor, University of Kansas School of Law. I would like to thank Michelle J. Anderson, Joanne Archambault, I. Bennett Capers, John J. Donahue III, Joshua Fischman, Aya Gruber, Dan M. Kahan, Benjamin Hansen, Michael Heise, Tamara Rice Lave, Kimberly A. Lonsway, J.J. Prescott, Lumen Mulligan, Melissa E. Murray, Carolyn Ramsey, David L. Schwartz, Sonja Starr, Deborah Tuerkheimer, Marianne Wesson, David Yokum, and the participants of the Criminal Justice Section at the AALS Annual Meeting, the University of Michigan Sex and Justice Conference, the Feminist Influence on Criminal Law Workshop at University of Colorado Law School, the faculty workshop at Case Western University School of Law, the Conference on Empirical Legal Studies at University of Pennsylvania Law School, and the Women and Law Section at the AALS Annual Meeting. 1198 IOWA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 99:1197 Correcting the data to remove police undercounting by imputing data from highly correlated murder rates, the study conservatively estimates that 796,213 to 1,145,309 complaints of forcible vaginal rapes of female victims nationwide disappeared from the official records from 1995 to 2012. Further, the corrected data reveal that the study period includes fifteen to eighteen of the highest rates of rape since tracking of the data began in 1930. Instead of experiencing the widely reported “great decline” in rape, America is in the midst of a hidden rape crisis. Further, the techniques that conceal rape complaints deprioritize those cases so that police conduct little or no investigation. Consequently, police leave serial rapists, who constitute the overwhelming majority of rapists, free to attack more victims. Based upon the findings of this study, governments at all levels must revitalize efforts to combat the cloaked rise in sexual violence and the federal government must exercise greater oversight of the crime reporting process to ensure accuracy of the data provided. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................... 1200 I. POLICE UNDERCOUNTING OF RAPE COMPLAINTS ................................ 1206 A. U NIFORM C RIME R EPORTS .............................................................. 1206 1. Rape Data .............................................................................. 1208 2. Study Data ............................................................................. 1210 B. M EDIA I NVESTIGATION OF P OLICE U NDERCOUNTING ........................ 1212 C. W HY P OLICE U NDERCOUNT ............................................................ 1214 1. Political Forces ..................................................................... 1214 2. Cultural Forces ..................................................................... 1218 D. H OW P OLICE U NDERCOUNT ............................................................ 1220 1. “Unfounded” Designation ................................................... 1221 2. Lesser-Crime Classification .................................................. 1223 3. Police Gatekeeping .............................................................. 1224 II. IDENTIFYING UNDERCOUNTING POLICE DEPARTMENTS ...................... 1225 A. E STABLISHING A B ASELINE .............................................................. 1225 1. Murder Rate Baseline .......................................................... 1225 2. Removing National Trends ................................................. 1226 B. P ROFILE OF A T YPICAL J URISDICTION ............................................... 1227 C. P ROFILE OF AN U NDERCOUNTER ...................................................... 1228 D. T ESTING P OLICE D EPARTMENTS ...................................................... 1232 III. ESTIMATING THE LOST DATA ............................................................... 1238 IV. IMPLICATIONS ...................................................................................... 1241 A. M ORAL D IMENSION ........................................................................ 1241 2014] HOW TO LIE WITH RAPE STATISTICS 1199 B. D EPRIORITIZATION ......................................................................... 1245 CONCLUSION ....................................................................................... 1248 APPENDIX A: JURISDICTIONS IN STUDY SAMPLE ................................... 1250 1200 IOWA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 99:1197 “I’ll swallow a lie when I have to; I’ve swallowed a few big ones lately. But the stat games? That lie? It’s what ruined this department; shining up s**t and calling it gold so majors become colonels and mayors become governors; pretending to do police work while one generation f*****g trains the next how not to do the job.” —Cedric Daniels, The Wire 1 INTRODUCTION Cedric Daniels uttered those words in the series finale of The Wire before he resigned his position as the fictional Police Commissioner of Baltimore. 2 Daniels refused to fabricate reductions in crime rates by manipulating the statistics, as was the long-term practice in the city’s police department. He believed that the so-called “stat games” advanced careers, but ultimately undermined law enforcement by encouraging police to short-circuit investigations and remove reported incidents from official records. In a case of life imitating art, 3 just a year after The Wire ended, a reporter from The Baltimore Sun exposed the Baltimore Police Department’s practice of substantially undercounting reported rapes in the data it submitted to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”) as part of the Uniform Crime Report (“UCR”) program. 4 The FBI collects data from nearly every police department across the country to create the annual UCR, 5 which has long served as the primary resource used by policymakers, media, and law enforcement for assessing the prevalence and rate of crime in the United States. 6 From 1995 until 2009, the Baltimore Police Department provided 1. The Wire: -30- (HBO television broadcast Mar. 9, 2008). 2. Id. 3. The more precise statement might be “life imitating art, which was imitating life.” David Simon, the creator of The Wire , stated that he took his depiction of police manufacturing crime statistics directly from his firsthand experience as a long-time crime reporter for The Baltimore Sun observing the Baltimore Police Department. See David Simon, David Simon: ‘The Wire’ Has Nothing to Apologize for , BALT. SUN (Jan. 24, 2011), http://articles.baltimoresun.com/2011-01-24/news/bs-edthe-wire-20110124_1_arrest-rates-commissioner-bealefeld-crimes (describing the process by which police “improperly downgrade[d]” crimes in official counts under the administration of Baltimore Mayor, now Maryland Governor, Martin O’Malley). 4. See Justin Fenton, Baltimore Falls Out of Top 5 Murder Rate Cities: Rape Numbers Also on the Rise Following Reforms , BALT. SUN (June 11, 2012, 7:06 PM), http://www.baltimoresun.com/ news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-ci-baltimore-murder-rate-20120611,0,5457597,full.story (detailing the role of The Baltimore Sun in uncovering police underreporting of rape to the FBI as part of the UCR program). 5. See NATHAN JAMES & LOGAN RISHARD COUNCIL, CONG. RESEARCH SERV., RL34309, HOW CRIME IN THE UNITED STATES IS MEASURED 5−6 (2008), available at https://www.fas.org/sgp/ crs/misc/RL34309.pdf. 6. See id. at 2 (“UCR data are now used extensively by academics and government officials for research, policy, and planning purposes, and the data are widely cited in the media. The UCR also provides some of the most commonly cited crime statistics in the United States.”); LARRY J. SIEGEL, CRIMINOLOGY 30 (11th ed. 2012) (“The UCR is the best known and most widely cited source of official criminal statistics.”); Kimberly A. Lonsway & Joanne Archambault, The “Justice Gap” for Sexual Assault Cases: Future Directions for Research and Reform , 18 VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN 145, 149 (2012) (“[Widespread citation to the UCR] is . . . likely attributable 2014] HOW TO LIE WITH RAPE STATISTICS 1201 UCR numbers that indicated that the rate of rape had declined by a remarkable 74% in the city. 7 The investigation by The Baltimore Sun ultimately demonstrated that the...