Fewer than 4% of reported rapes, sexual assaults, and child sex abuse allegations in some cities result in a sex crime conviction. An NBC News investigation based on a review of thousands of documents from police departments, prosecutors and courts underscore what many advocates, experts and some law enforcement authorities have long said: The system routinely fails to get justice for victims.NBC News and 10 local NBC stations spent more than a year tracing offenses from crime to conviction and found that violent sex crimes have a lower arrest rate than most violent crimes, Black victims of sex crimes in Chicago are the least likely to see a conviction, and those accused of violent sex crimes were often able to secure plea deals that would keep them off the sex offender list. This happens even in California, which usually prohibits the practice.
Tracing convictions is “really hard because it’s a combination of several different databases that are not available directly to the public,” said University of Kansas School of Law research Prof. Corey Yung. “Our system, from arrest for conviction to crimes, is not transparent. There’s no overarching data source like there are in other countries. It makes it incredibly difficult, in criminal law, to know what’s going on, from reported crimes all the way to convictions.” Law enforcement agencies use different metrics to track crime resolutions. The FBI uses a “clearance rate,” which counts cases resolved by conviction or closed due to other factors. Prosecutors track the number of people presented to them with enough evidence to put a case together. Police departments measure the percentage of people arrested for a particular crime. NBC News focused on the total number of violent sex crimes reported to an agency and the number of people found guilty of those specific crimes. Looking at how police departments measure it — by arrest rate — shows that resolutions to violent sex crimes trail other types of crime. Experts say the number of sex crimes reported to officials is an undercount of the crimes that occur. “A fraction of cases that get reported to police, a tiny fraction, end up resulting in any kind of sentence for the person accused,” said Northwestern University law Prof. Deborah Tuerkheimer, a former assistant district attorney in Manhattan,
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