The first meeting of a task force charged with auditing Baltimore police rape reports is due to meet July 8. This comes after Sunday's Baltimore Sun article that reported city police have one of the highest rates of unfounding rape complaints made by women.
The audit is being led by the mayor's criminal justice head but will involve top police commanders. As chief police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi told me, "The commissioner wants to dig deep. We have to work hard to restore public trust in the fact that we're going to investigate these rapes."
The spokeswoman for the Baltimore State's Attorney's Office, Margaret T. Burns, said prosecutors have heard that nurses at Mercy Medical Center, where most sexual assault victims are taken, have complained about strong-armed tactics of detectives who investigate the cases.
The problem is also born out of pressure to reduce crime, at least on paper. Police commanders are under constant pressure to produce good crime stats, and that reaches down to the patrol cops and the detectives. Even if they're not specifically told to find ways to not write reports, and thus count crime, they understand the pressure to keep crime low. The easiest way to do that is to record it, or record it such a way that it doesn't count toward the stats.
Sheldon F. Greenberg, who runs a polic executive training program at Johns Hopkins University, said, "The problem is national, not just in Baltimore. "Police officials have difficulties defining the value of what their people do on a day-to-day basis other than through statistics. They give the politicians what they want — statistics as a way of measuring success."