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Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Chief of PR Spin (and also police)

Suppressing rape statistics is all the rage in police work these days. Guess who's an industry leader?
Nashville police are reclassifying hundreds of sexual assault claims after an investigation found deliberate distortions of statistics, of which one victim said, "I felt like I was raped a second time. They stripped me of any right that I had."

Essentially, police officers were claiming rapes had gone down — from 390 in 2004 to 290 in 2009 — when in reality they had simply been intimidating victims into not reporting, or marking cases as "matter of record," which doesn't count in the final violent crime statistics. Most depressing of all is the fact that Nashville is not at all alone — and those are just the police departments that have been called on it.


Nashville Police Chief 2004-2009: Ronal Serpas

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