CLEVELAND, Ohio – “Missed opportunities” to prosecute past rapes can help catch perpetrators now before they go on to become serial offenders, researchers say.
The details of more than 200 cases that didn’t make it to court when they were initially reported, but did after rape kits collected at the time were tested are helping researchers working with Cuyahoga County’s Sexual Assault Kit task force find out how.
Among the findings: It’s nearly impossible for an understaffed sex crimes unit to thoroughly investigate difficult cases, leaving the onus for follow-though on the victims of one of the most traumatic events that could happen to a person.
And that prosecuting some of the toughest cases, ones involving victims who are drug addicts, prostitutes or are mentally ill can put serial rapists in prison, said Rachel Lovell, a senior researcher with the Begun Center for Violence Prevention Research and Education at Case Western Reserve University.
Read the report here or below in a document viewer.
The question is whether the lessons learned from the testing of thousands of rape kits translates to cases reported today.
Most of the cases researchers examined were reported between 1993 and 1997. In each, rape kits were collected at a hospital and turned over to police, but not tested until recently.
To figure out what, aside from DNA testing technology, had changed, researchers mapped what happened at each step after the rape was reported. Then they looked at how the investigations were handled when the case was re-opened by the task force.
The cases represent a small number of the more than 6,000 old rapes reported to police in Cleveland and its suburbs that are being reviewed by the task force, which includes roughly 30 investigators, prosecutors and victim advocates.
Here’s a look at what the report found and whether any significant changes have been made or are under consideration in Cleveland, where a majority of the rapes were reported.
Staffing and workload matter
Any “hiccup” in the process could derail a rape investigation, Lovell said. But most commonly, detectives closed cases after they could not locate a victim or quickly get them to travel downtown for an interview.
Often, it appeared that detectives didn’t have the time needed to do the work.
“To me, the real story is that police were just trying to keep up with something that they couldn’t possible have kept up with,” Lovell said.
Cleveland’s Sex Crimes & Child Abuse unit, formed in 1986, has been chronically understaffed almost since the beginning, despite the fact it handles complex cases that are considered among the most serious crimes.
The unit handles adult and child sexual assault reports in addition to hundreds of allegations of child abuse each year.
Over the past two decades, city and police leaders vowed repeatedly to add to the unit’s ranks. The promises are often short-lived.
The unit now has 13 detectives handling new cases full time. Another detective is assigned to handle evidence and two others work part-time for the task force on the backlogged investigations, according to department officials.
A city-commissioned Police Executive Research Forum analysis suggested in 2013 that the city add four detectives to the unit, primarily to staff an overnight shift when a third of rapes are reported. The department’s own resource and deployment analysis completed in June 2016 recommended that the unit have 17 full time detectives.
Chief of Criminal Investigations for the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s office discusses a case with members of the Cuyahoga County Sexual Assault Kit Task Force.<spanclass=”byline”>Lisa DeJong, The Plain Dealer
To contrast, the task force, which primarily handles cases reported prior to 2012, has 22 investigators and investigates fewer cases – roughly between 400 and 475. The task force benefits in many cases from DNA evidence Cleveland detectives didn’t have. But it is also solving cases with without DNA.
Victim follow up matters
The older rape cases stalled for many reasons – but most often because detectives couldn’t connect with the victim. Decisions to close those cases often came swiftly. A quarter were closed the day they hit a detective’s desk and half remained open a week or less.
It created a situation where victims coping with a severe trauma were made responsible for whether an investigation into their report of rape would occur.
“Victim cooperation” is expected by the system but it often fails to provide the victims the support and information need to ensure continued cooperation, the report states.
The criminal justice system should be more patient with victims, who are often emotionally immobilized in the days after an attack as their bodies biologically react, said Rebecca Campbell, an expert in victims’ responses to trauma, who completed a federally-funded research report on a similar rape kit testing project in Detroit.
Time to sleep allows victims’ brains to organize their memories and to make decisions on whether or not to cooperate with law enforcement.
“You can’t make a major life decision in the middle of an adrenaline rush,” Campbell said.
Nobody has come up with studied guidelines on how long a victim may need or whether a department should continue to periodically contact a victim, she said. The best advice at the moment, Campbell said, is to make it clear that the door is open at any point a victim wants to cooperate.
Task force investigators have a mandate to reach every victim and, if evidence supports prosecution, to take the cases as far as they can unless a victim is certain they don’t want to participate. At that point, prosecutors discuss any potential public safety ramifications of not taking the case to court. They include victim advocates in that discussion as well.
Cleveland police, in recent years, are sending more cases for prosecution. In the older cases reviewed for the report, only about a quarter were referred for prosecution. In 2015, Cleveland police referred 47 percent of reported rapes to county prosecutors.
Police officials have said it is up to victims whether they want to cooperate with a police investigation.
Cases with ‘vulnerable victims’ can be won
Victims who live with mental illness, have a drug addiction or have been prostitutes are among the most likely to be targeted by rapists, and the least likely to be believed or viewed as credible witnesses.
In the past, those cases were often quickly dropped.
Yet, the study found, even cases with victims that had histories of prostitution, mental illness or drug or alcohol use were almost as likely to net a conviction when rape kits associated with the report were tested and the case was reinvestigated.
The availability of DNA, after the victims’ rape kits were tested, may very well have bolstered the cases, though cases without DNA pointing to a suspect were successfully prosecuted as well.
“These vulnerabilities do make cases harder to investigate and prosecute–harder to contact, harder to interview, memories might not be as reliable, statements are not bullet-proof, probably less evidence collected to begin with, and of course, the perceived stigma that jurors might have,” Lovell said.
“These weaknesses are not insurmountable. Just because a victim had one or more of these vulnerabilities does not mean the case is a “no-win,” she said.
In the past, she said, detectives who lacked forensic evidence or the time to put into investigating, made assumptions that down the line the cases would not be successful so they didn’t give them as much attention.
Now, there’s mounting evidence that that putting more effort into those harder cases, even ones with “difficult” victims, will get serial rapists off the streets sooner.
A victim’s history is still a factor though. Of the small number of reinvestigated cases that prosecutors closed without asking for an indictment, 24 percent involved victims that were deemed ‘vulnerable’ because of drug use, mental illness or prostitution backgrounds.
Issues of victim drug use, mental illness or sex work are still part of the decision making process, though the way they are discussed has changed.
“We have to talk about this constantly so we don’t fall into the same traps that happened when the case was reported,” Rick Bell, chief of investigations for the prosecutor’s office, shared in Washington D.C. when presenting at a national symposium on sexual assault investigations in September.
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