Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Phillips Rape Stats: Channel Five Gets Police to Admit How Much They Cooked the Books
Posted by Betsy Phillips on Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 6:05 AM
Channel 5 is reporting that, over the past three years, more than 200 rapes were "mislabeled" as "matter of record" — a category that doesn't go into the final crime statistics.
The police had been showing a steady and dramatic improvement in the rape statistics for the city. We now know that's a lie. In fact, looking through the Sex Crimes website, it really drives home just how pernicious this lie is.
Their Powerpoint presentation that is an Overview of Adult Rape in Nashville is now filled with lies. Page three is a chart of how many rapes are committed in which months. You can't trust that, because now we know the numbers are a lie. The number of rapes per which day of the week? Also unreliable. When rapes occur? Doesn't include all the rapes, so who knows? Is it true only 10 percent of rapes included a weapon? We don't know. And on and on, pages of numbers we now know are lies.
And if the police department is willing to lie about something as basic as how many women in Nashville were raped, you have to wonder what else they've been lying about. That's the scary thing.
As long as I've been following this story, one thing that has stood out to me is that, all along, police officers have been trying to raise red flags — about book-cooking, about special treatment for officers who might be dangerous to women, etc.
We have serious problems in our police department, ones that should make any rape victim vigilant about how her case is being handled, but we have good officers on the force.
Which is the other problem with lies like this. No matter how good most are, something this bad taints everyone.
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