This is related to other "coding issues." My house was broken in to last summer. My neighbors noticed and called the police (I was not home). The officers who responded browbeat my neighbors then concluded that I must have been drunk and left my door unlocked (my neighbors told them I neither drink nor ever leave my door unlocked). I followed up with other officers when I got home. I was told it was a breaking and entering.

When I got a copy of the report, it was listed as a door left open, despite a punched out screen.

So, when, a few months later, I was sexually assaulted in the city, do you think I called the police? I'm not stupid, and I didn't want to be belittled, insulted and browbeaten again, so I did not.

How do you think the Police Commissioner continues to talk about crime reduction under his watch?

When the Department hada downgrading problem in the 60's, the solution, that worked well into the 80's, was to take some of the discretion from Patrol. It worked like this: A victim/complainant would call and the phone was answered by a trained civilian call clerk. That clerk would make the determination as to what type of incident was being reported, assign a unique number to it and sent it to the dispatcher. Once the call clerk coded the incident, it could not be changed and if it was a part one or any number of other specified incidents, the patrol officer was required to write a report. The report and the original card completed by the clerk were then matched up my the civilian Staff Review and if the call clerk had coded a sex offense, the officer's report would have to cover that. Eliminating the reporting requirements saved officers a lot of time and work but opened the door to sloppy investigations.

"the commander of the sex offense unit dismissed the high number of cases by saying, "We have a lot of people that are engaged in sexual activity in this city." He also said that the city's various services for women and victims led women to make up stories to take advantage of them. "

If this is how the commander of the sex offense unit responds, it is a wonder than any rapes are reported. These comments are, at best, inane and, at worst, insensitive. They surely should not be comments made by someone overseeing sex crimes for the police department. I'm appalled!

I'll repost my comment and links from the Sun boards if you will let me.

Depending on what studies you believe, anywhere from 8 to 40 percent of all claims of rape are false.

The 2 percent figure was given by Brownmiller back in the early 1970's and was not based on any kind of study. It's been quoted in many legal papers as if it was some sort of established fact, but if one traces it back, it really is baseless as this law review paper proves.

Here is a good overvview of false rape claims:

http://www.slate.com/id/2231012

Here, Brownmiller seemingly defends her "statistic":
http://www.anandaanswers.com/pages/naaRefute.html
But as you can see from this :
http://llr.lls.edu/volumes/v33-issue3/greer.pdf
*an Adobe PDF file*

She's almost certainly wrong.

So what conclusions can be reasonably drawn from all this?
A. The 2 percent rate is history. False accusations of rape occur at least 3, and perhaps as many as 10 times as often, throwing out most of the outlier "higher rate" studies.
B. For years, Brownmiller has been quoted as THE authority by a group of people who had political, personal, and financial reasons to never fact-check her. I'm not going to get on the feminists too much though. Most of the reason in my opinion was intellectual laziness NOT deliberate indifference to the possibility of men being falsely accused. Some exceptions such as uber feminist blogger/former Edwards Campaign blogger Amanda Marcotte duly noted. And such laziness occurs among all large political groups such as Tea baggers and socialists.
C. Since false accusations remain a very real possibility , I urge the Mayor to make sure more cases are forwarded to detectives for investigation but not to in ANY WAY try to politically force "more convictions".