U.S. public divided over whether people convicted of crimes spend too much or too little time in prison

….that I saw a few years back in the Star-Tribune was an appraisal of how much effort police departments had put into sexual assault investigations. They looked at about 2000 of them, if memory serves, and found that only 20% of the investigations did a good basic investigation of the available facts—victim interviews, interviews of the accused, processing of physical evidence, etc.. It was worth noting that Minnesota police were doing about twice as good as average at actually putting rapists in jail despite this lack of effort, too. So nationwide, it’s pretty dismal in this regard and others.

I’d dare suggest that we ought to have periodic audits of police departments and prosecutors to see what investigations are, or are not, being done, and what prosecutors are, or are not, doing with these cases. If we have a pattern of failing to investigate (while still heavily prosecuting minor dopers and speeding tickets), it’s time to take a few officers off traffic patrol and teach them how to investigate burglary/theft/assault/murder/rape/etc..

Along these lines, it’s something of a personal thing for me, as my daughter’s boyfriend is an aspiring forensics expert, but he’s more or less being told that he’s got to do his time in things like traffic patrol at very low pay while he waits to do the things he’s been trained to do in college. If you want to prevent real crimes from being solved, you can hardly design the system better.

There’s a whole range of policies and practices in municipal and county police agencies across the country. Quite a few have “periodic audits of police departments and prosecutors.” Some have gone too far, and civilian oversight boards micromanage the chief and internal policies. Others have too little accountability. In some places, police unions and collective bargaining agreements have insured that specialists like your daughter’s boyfriend can’t go straight to their thing….or at least to a field assignment that is more likely to enhance it. In other departments, these forensics roles are filled by civilians who never become officers at all.

Much study and ink exists on the trade-offs of one approach vs. another, but like most professions/sectors change is uneven. In some places, every new idea is embraced before it’s even half examined. In others, ideas that were new two decades ago and have mountains of supporting evidence in their favor are still looked at as risky departures from long-standing practices.

So… the situation is complex, largely because of this wonderful thing called freedom. Sometimes we think more federal law standardizing things would improve policing. No doubt, sometimes it would. Other times, the unintended consequences add up to a pretty bad set of trade-offs. But rest assured, lots of people are working on making policing better. I work with a bunch of them every day.

Joe, understood that a lot of people don’t want to go forward—sure, put that in the data. What the Star-Tribune found, though, is that in a sample of 2000 or so cases where the victims/complainants wanted to go forward, only 20% of the investigations covered the basic bases. Lots of departments around my state are in this bin, and the scary thing is that with 5% vs.2-3% conviction rates vs. reports to police, we’re doing a lot better than average. The categories were things like “was physical evidence collected and analyzed if available?”, “was the complainant interviewed?”, “was the accused interviewed?”, and the like. Whatever systems were in place, per Aaron’s comment, were not sufficient to get this done.

Nationwide, there were recently hundreds of thousands of unprocessed rape kits—victims sometimes joke bitterly that if you want to smuggle a gun past the police, put it in a rape kit, because you know they won’t touch those. You’ll see the same kind of thing with riots in many cities, looting (e.g. California), and the like.

There have been multiple federal and state funded efforts to solve the SAK (Sexual Assault Kit) backlog problem going for longer than I’ve been paying attention to the topic, mid-2015 (e.g. from 2017 @NIJ, and one from 2010). IACP has been working on the problem (through federal grant) along with RTI for a good while: mostly the educating agencies/training/best-practices piece. IACP can’t staff crime labs. Progress is occurring but slowly.

The problem is complex because the bottlenecks occur at different points along the evidence processing chain, depending on the location. And you have all the usual government struggles with funding, personnel, etc.

I’m not sure how up to date their data is, but EndTheBacklog has an interactive map showing state level efforts to mitigate the problem.

It’s not like people don’t care about the problem… though arguably, not enough people care enough.

Of course, ultimately, there’s no substitute for a healthy culture that doesn’t crank out large numbers of sexual predators. You can only do so much on the prosecution side of things. But on that note, there are lots of programs and studies involved in prevention efforts also. Unfortunately, some are excessively hindered by politics and political idealism, so you can’t, for example, tell young women to avoid going to wild parties and getting drunk. In some places, this is seen as ‘blaming the victim,’ even if you’re saying it to people who aren’t victims yet, that you hope never will be.