On Monday of this week, the FBI said that violent crimes reported to the police were down for a third straight year dropping 5.3% in 2009 and reported cases of rape dropped by 2.6%. What a joke, the problem with these statistics are that law enforcement agencies are not required by law to submit data but do so voluntarily. Sexual assault and rape cases are consistently underestimated if reported at all. There is still the attitude that sex crimes are marginal issues and this view is prevalent in police departments across the nation and is a huge contributor to the under reporting of rape and sexual assault cases. Furthermore, members of the U.S. Senate chaired by Sen. Arlen Specter,D-Penn also doubt the validity of this recently released FBI report and held a subcommittee hearing on uninvestigated rape cases. The combination of bias and inaccurate data submitted by law enforcement agencies should be a concern to all Americans. As one example, The Baltimore Sun investigated and revealed that police in that city were ignoring rape claims and refusing to pass them on to investigators. A similar investigation by the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2000 revealed that law enforcement in that city secretly dumped thousands of cases of rape with little investigation and downgraded other claims for nearly two decades. Senators were told in the subcommittee hearing that police departments in several big cities, including St. Louis, New Orleans, Milwaukee, New York and Cleveland are employing similar tactics “to sweep reports of rape under the rug”.
A final note, sexual assault is one of the most under reported crimes, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, even thou 1 out of every 6 American women has been a victim of an attempted rape or completed rape in her lifetime.
Crime Is Real, Don’t Be a Victim!
Gerald Urban