Source: nbcnews.com 1/10/25
[ACSOL is showing you this because it is very disturbing and will be used against us]
Data from eight major cities shows that less than 4% of sex crimes result in conviction
Less than 4% of reported rapes, sexual assaults, and child sex abuse allegations in certain cities across the United States ever result in a sex crime conviction, an NBC News investigation found.
The results of the investigation — based on a review of thousands of documents from police departments, prosecutors and courts in cities from Los Angeles to Boston — underscore what many advocates, experts and some law enforcement authorities have long said: The system routinely fails to get justice for victims.
NBC News and 10 local NBC stations spent more than a year tracing offenses from crime to conviction and found:
- Violent sex crimes have a lower arrest rate than most violent crimes.
- In Chicago, Black victims of sex crimes are the least likely to see a conviction.
- Those accused of violent sex crimes were often able to secure plea deals that would keep them off the sex offender list. This happens even in California, which usually prohibits the practice.
This is a news story, not a peer-reviewed, vetted study. Just bits and pieces of studies and reviews.
Comparing different jurisdictions is comparing apples to oranges, even in jargon and terminology.
Reported, investigated, alleged, arrested, pled, convicted, probation are all very different things.
These reports don’t show all of the evidence, or lack thereof.
Plea deals/probation are the norm in many judicial districts, because, like in mine, resources are in too short supply to try every case. In my district, the DA’s office only has the resources to try 1/3 cases.
Sex offense cases often don’t go to trial, particularly non-violent or no victim cases, due to the defendant not wanting public media scrutiny. The DA’s/prosecutors use that as a bargaining chip in their favor to get easy convictions, even in borderline cases.
Sadly, too many in the general public and politicians will take these news stories too literally, as solid fact, to create more moral panic; when they should be taken with a grain of salt.
“Over the past four decades, homicide clearance rates – the metric used to determine how many homicides police solve – have decreased from about 71% in 1980 to an all-time low of about 50% in 2020, according to separate analyses of FBI data by the non-profits the Marshall Project and Murder Accountability Project.” (from The Guardian)
When half of murders are solved (the NBC piece even shows a 47.5% MURDER arrest rate in the jurisdictions it looked at!!), it’s unfair to single out the victims of violent sex crimes as uniquely denied “justice.” There is a very clear hemorrhaging of police capability, especially in urban police departments, to solve major crimes, and there are few solutions proposed. We only just made an arrest in the largest mass shooting in Michigan’s history a year after the crime, with little fanfare. Three people were just shot in an apartment in Ann Arbor-adjacent Ypsilanti today, no suspects. This is a massive problem and has nothing to do with lack of respect for victims of sex crimes.
Wait! So a [person who commits a violent offense] signs a plea deal and gets to remain off list , but [a person who commits a misdemeanor] gets on it? How deep do we have to dig to find the logic in that!