Anyone who’s seen The Wire knows the drill here: There’s political pressure to have lower crime rates, and so crimes are downgraded and not fully pursued. Which, in New York, has let serial rapists go free.
An investigative report by the Village Voice uncovered nothing short of a scandal. A series of articles exposed the New York Police Department’s practice of consistently “undercharging” crimes in an effort to meet “performance measurements” (quotas are illegal) and make crime statistics appear more palatable. The manipulation of statistics was caught on tapes in which NYPD higher-ups can be heard telling street cops to downgrade crimes or simply not to report particular crimes at all.
Numerous courageous police officers have come forward to tell their tales of questionable police policies, such as retired detective Harry Hernandez, who details a harrowing account of police misconduct related to serial rapist Daryl Thomas. While NYC sexual assault prevention groups say that the issue of under-reporting and undercharging of crimes has been a “growing problem” over the last two years, these “shady police policies,” writes Alex DiBranco on the Women’s Rights blog, had particularly devastating consequences when Thomas was able to sexually assault six different women in a single neighborhood over a period of two months. He was on his way to a seventh when a “lucky break” fueled his capture by police. The brutal spree should have triggered alarm bells, but went unnoticed for so long because the NYPD kept downgrading the assaults to “criminal trespassing.”
Read the details here, and in the Village Voice.