Southern Baptists Overwhelmingly Approve Abuse Reforms, Public Database

One thing to note regarding these claims is that what’s done to get there is that there are 2-10% of claims where the police are willing to bet something between a ham sandwich and their homes that they are false—only a tiny portion of which are ever prosecuted as perjury. We’re not talking about “lying beyond a reasonable doubt” here. On the flip side, about 2-3% result in convictions, and the remaining 90% or so are in a cloud of “could not or would not investigate to a reasonable conclusion.”

So my best guess is that far more than 2-10% of allegations are false, but exactly how much, I don’t know. Again, either the police could not, or would not investigate further.

That noted, even if we knew it was only 2% (or even less), wouldn’t we want to investigate?

(BTW, Tom, appreciate your feedback here….your point is well taken, but I’m still in the position of “somehow we’ve got to try here”)

So my best guess is that far more than 2-10% of allegations are false, but exactly how much, I don’t know. Again, either the police could not, or would not investigate further.

The actual rate of false accusations is between 2-10% according to several sources I checked online like at the National Sexual Violence Center (here) or the FBI (cited by this website although I couldn’t find a direct link). Guys are statistically far more likely to be assaulted themselves (1/6 men) than to be falsely accused of rape or sexual assault. It’s a difficult item to pin down with certainty as you can’t really quantify the number of times a thing doesn’t happen.

Jay, no doubt the best estimates are 2-10%. Let’s understand what it actually means, though. 2-10% is not perjury convictions—if it were, we’d have the horrific reality that 3x as many people were being convicted of perjury in rape cases as were convicted of rape. It merely means that police had some reason to believe—confidence level somewhere between “willing to bet a ham sandwich” and “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt”—that the allegations were false. So we’d first say “you know, some of that 2-10% are false positives”, i.e. conclusions of false accusation that are themselves false. It could be lower.

Then you’ve got about 5% that result in criminal charges, of which 3% result in a conviction, and 2% a prison sentence. That leaves a huge portion—discussed at length by this Star-Tribune report—where investigators could not or would not go forward. Intoxication is a big part of it, but also part of it is dedicating resources to traffic patrol and arresting minor league dopers instead of investigating sexual assault. Here in MN, where we seem to do about twice as well as the national average in prosecuting these things, a third of accusers don’t get interviewed, a quarter of cases don’t even get assigned to an investigator, and half of cases don’t get possible witnesses interviewed. Overall, only about a quarter of cases here get a good basic investigation.

My contention is that if you made the effort ot interview the accuser and possible witnesses, you’d get both more convictions for sexual assault and more cases where the accuser has made a false accusation.

One side note regarding the “low portion of false accusations” is that, as I’ve mentioned above, false accusations are on the same order of magnitude, as far as I can tell, as legitimate prosecutions and convictions. It’s also worth noting that only rarely are false accusations (perjury) punished, so there is a legitimate perception among “prospective defendants” (i.e. “men”) that the system is somewhat rigged against them. They are, after all, seeing about as much evidence of false accusations going unpunished as of rapists actually being convicted.

The “low rate of false accusations” is often said as if it means men don’t need to be worried about them, but those are the actual statistics. And we don’t even know what the case is, really, in that middle 87-95% of cases.

Keep in mind that these guys are also serving on juries, and every bit of testimony that isn’t subject to punishment for perjury is worth less than testimony that is. So the end result of what police are doing now—ostensibly to avoid suppressing reporting—is to keep rapists out of jail.

Really, the whole system, even in the best states, is a mess. We’ve got failure to assign investigators, failure to interview accusers, failure to interview possible witnesses, failure to process rape kits, failure to punish perjurers, and a whole lot more.

The only way out of this is to turn those patterns around by taking Officer Friendly off traffic patrol, or hire bright young graduates with a forensics degree (like my new son in law, yeah, I’m biased here on many levels) to turn these patterns around.