New York Police Erase Sexual Assault Complaints, Protect Repeat Offenders

Update: Thanks to the hundreds of emails sent by Change.org members and action taken by advocates and concerned police officers themselves, the NYPD has accepted six recommendations from a special sex crimes task force to improve how it deals with rape.

Fueled by a culture that prioritizes making crime statistics looks good rather than actually stopping criminals, the New York Police Department has been misreporting serious felonies as lesser misdemeanors to game the system and improve its image, the Village Voice reports in a series investigating shady police practices. By falsifying complaints of sexual assault and attempted rape, NY police are allowing repeat offenders to attack with impunity, with nobody able to see the pattern that would point to the existence of a serial offender.

That's exactly what happened in the case of Daryl Thomas, a man who admitted to sexually assaulting six women before he got nabbed by a stroke of random luck on his seventh attempted rape. But even though his attacks all occurred in the same area and in the same manner, what should have been an obvious pattern went unnoticed. Why? Because these complaints of sexual assault and attempted rape instead were classified as "criminal trespassing," with officers careful to revise the reports to erase the appearance of the original, accurate criminal charge.

One of Thomas' later victims, Jennifer Krupa, suffered from debilitating panic attacks for over a year after being assaulted by Thomas, an incident which left her face bruised and neck cut. Could her trauma have been prevented if the crimes were registered correctly, which would have led to a massive hunt for the perpetrator as soon as a pattern had been detected? "Everybody overlooked the fact that they allowed this predator to remain on the loose," stated former NYPD Detective Harold Hernandez, who discovered the faked reports.

Hernandez voices his disgust with the NYPD's fervent need to show positive numbers at the expense of the safety of the public. "They've lost sight of their oath," he critiques.

Another officer who spoke to the Village Voice reported that the pressure to categorize serious offense as lesser charges "has turned a police officer who shouldn't care about what the complaint is into a defense attorney." Police are incentivized to push victims who come forward to drop allegations that would require a crime to be classified as a felony rather than a misdemeanor, hurting the victim's chances at receiving justice before an investigation ever starts or a trial is underway. And with women hesitant to report rape or sexual assault, in part because their complaints can dismissed out-of-hand by police, this additional anti-victim incentive compounds an already significant problem when it comes to violence against women.

H/T Feministing.

Photo credit: neoliminal