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99 Iowa L. Rev. 1197 (2013-2014)
How to Lie with Rape Statistics: America's Hidden Rape Crisis

handle is hein.journals/ilr99 and id is 1235 raw text is: How to Lie with Rape Statistics: America's Hidden Rape Crisis Corey Rayburn Yung* ABSTRACT: During the last two decades, many police departments substantially undercounted reported rapes creating paper reductions in crime. Media investigations in Baltimore, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and St. Louis found that police eliminated rape complaints from official counts because of cultural hostility to rape complaints and to create the illusion of success in fighting violent crime. The undercounting cities used three difficult-to-detect methods to remove rape complaints from official records: designating a complaint as unfounded with little or no investigation; classifying an incident as a lesser offense; and, failing to create a written report that a victim made a rape complaint. This study addresses how widespread the practice of undercounting rape is in police departments across the country. Because identifying fraudulent and incorrect data is essentially the task of distinguishing highly unusual data patterns, I apply a statistical outlier detection technique to determine which jurisdictions have substantial anomalies in their data. Using this novel method to determine if other municipalities likely failed to report the true number of rape complaints made, I find significant undercounting of rape incidents by police departments across the country. The results indicate that approximately 22 % of the 210 studied police departments responsible for populations of at least loo,ooo persons have substantial statistical irregularities in their rape data indicating considerable undercounting from 1995 to 2012. Notably, the number of undercounting jurisdictions has increased by over 61 % during the eighteen years studied. * Associate Professor, University of Kansas School of Law. I would like to thank Michelle J. Anderson, Joanne Archambault, 1. Bennett Capers, John J. Donahue III, Joshua Fischman, Aya Gruber, Dan M. Kahan, Benjamin Hansen, Michael Heise, Tamara Rice Lave, Kimberly A. Lonsway, J.J. Prescott, Lumen Mulligan, Melissa E. Murray, Carolyn Ramsey, David L. Schwartz, Sonja Starr, Deborah Tuerkheimer, Marianne Wesson, David Yokum, and the participants of the Criminal Justice Section at the AALS Annual Meeting, the University of Michigan Sex and Justice Conference, the Feminist Influence on Criminal Law Workshop at University of Colorado Law School, the faculty workshop at Case Western University School of Law, the Conference on Empirical Legal Studies at University of Pennsylvania Law School, and the Women and Law Section at the AALS Annual Meeting. 1197

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