The San Francisco Police Department cleared 14 percent of rape cases last year—half the national rate. An investigation finds that rape kits get tested fast, only for cases to be quietly shelved. Often, the only thing standing “between a report and the shelf” is what’s known as a “pretext call,” a recorded phone conversation in which a survivor tries to extract an admission of guilt from their attacker (aka relives their trauma to do the police’s work for them):
She sat in a room at the SVU headquarters with [Sergeant Johnathan] Ng and a recorder. She dialed the man she alleged raped her. He didn’t pick up. She tried again. No answer.
“If we don’t get an admission, it’s a he-said, she-said thing,” she remembered Ng telling her.
Then, she said, he offered some unsolicited advice.
“He told me that I probably shouldn’t be hanging out with 55-year-old men,” she said.
More stories about sexual justice
What It Feels Like at Cornell Right Now
“I began to do what I do — reading and writing and thinking about misogyny—because of my dismay at how girls and women are treated on campus, and at other college campuses across America.”
“That Guy is Still Out There”
“Five years after Anthony Broadwater was belatedly cleared for the sexual assault of Alice Sebold, the questions of how he came to be wrongly convicted and how one or more serial rapists operated for years with little consequence have only deepened.”
The Unflinching Courage of Taylor Cadle
“The police said she lied about being raped. Then she hit record.”
