What are the psychological and non-psychological dynamics to unreported crimes?

October 16, 2019 by Amirha Abisse

The majority of crimes in the United States, about 40%, are unreported to the police. Even the crimes that victims report usually don’t lead to convictions of perpetrators. Therefore, the government can’t fight a crime that doesn’t exist, and the offender carries with them, leaving the victim is scarred for life. Also, they can’t monitor the distribution of crimes to help avenge these victims. So why do victims not report? During the cases of rape, only about a miserable 2% of reported crimes lead to rapists’ incarceration. Despite that, there are higher chances of reporting crimes now than before.

The rates of unreported violence committed by a stranger declined slightly from 5 per 1,000 in 2012 to 3.8 per 1,000 in 2013.  This either means that fewer crimes are occurring, due to the 9 percent fall in criminal activity since 1973, or that people are not reporting the crimes. However, despite having an extensive police system that claims to ensure justice for all victims, why does this phenomenon persist? Why don’t the victims report the crimes to the police? Why the government has not combatted this issue yet? 

Various causes lead to unreported crime cases. First being that victims don’t trust that the police forces will assure that the perpetrators will be arrested and prosecuted or have a generally dramatizing experience with the way police handled a crime involving them in the past. Second, they fear that reporting would backlash, and they would be re-approached by the criminal or that it would make issues with friends and family members.  Lastly, especially for cybercrimes, it’s become prevalently easy for offenders to cover tracks, leaving the victims with no proof, and keeping the police unprepared for addressing such criminal activity. Rape and sexual assaults are the most unreported crimes in the United States. 

The Criminal Justice System: Statistics, shows that, most preparators of sexual violence are less likely to go to jail than other criminals; out of 1000 sexual assaults, 995 perpetrators will walk free. There are about 230 reported cases, yet why is it that only 4.6 cases lead to imprisonment of rapists? Is it that rape is too expensive and unimportant of a crime to prosecute, or is it because the universal understanding of rape only applies to some cases disregarding others despite the evidence? What happened to the other 770 unreported cases? Are the victim’s emotional and mental status being considered in all aspects?

There are multiple factors that prevent people from reporting sexual assault cases, and most of them relate to the way the police handled these situation when they were assigned to them. In a survey released by the U.S. Department of Justice, the top reason to why victims didn’t report to the police is that 12% of the time, police believed that the case was not important enough. People could argue that this only occurs with minor assaults, and the major ones, such as rape is given much importance and attention by the police. Sadly, that is not the case. A University of Texas student, for instance, filed a rape report to a police station in Austin. She stated that her screams and pleads for help were recorded on tape, but the case was dropped as the attacker, who’s a stranger, claimed that the sex was consensual. In another similar case, a student was forcibly taken to a motel and raped by three different men. After the analysis of the woman’s sexual assault kit, they found the DNAs of all the men that attacked her. The men were identified, but were not arrested by the police, only because they also claimed that it was consensual. The women are obviously devastated as the police refuse to take their accounts into consideration, despite the multiple evidence presented. Clearly, the police are providing minimal efforts in collecting evidence, and arresting the assaulters after they’ve been found, only because the perpetrators claimed it was “consensual.”

Such experiences lead to a psychological explanation, to unreported crime, known as legal cynicism, which is a frame that views the law and law enforcement agents as illegitimate, unresponsive and unprepared to ensure public safety; mistrust in police forces. Such allegations against the police are proven true under two additional cases. A 2018 report explained that two- thirds of police officers interviewed, did not know how to read and interpret sexual assault kit results. If it’s part of the investigation process why aren’t they taught how to read these reports just as they are prepared to read and act upon other kinds of reports. Other police officers claim that they are unfamiliar with basic female anatomy, which is not important in defining what occurs during sexual assault, and therefore, leaving this to be nothing but a lame excuse.

Despite all given excuses, if the police cannot prosecute rape cases with a complete stranger, how do they expect victims to trust them enough to come about assaults they experienced from a familiar person. A clinical psychologist living in Missoula Country, Montana, Margret Moore, reported that those who did report to the police often describe their experiences as traumatizing and full of judgement, and would often be blamed for getting themselves in such horrific situation. In some cases, officers even referred to the rape as “a girl [being] too drunk in a party” and didn’t take any of their testimony as evidence. Such cases are most prevalent in young women and minorities which happen to be the least likely to report sexual assault crimes, as presented by the U.S. Department of Justice. 

Another reason to why victims choose to report or not report criminal incidents is the fear that it will cause repercussions in the future. Of the sexual violence crimes not reported to the police between 2005 and 2010, 20% of the victims stated that they feared retaliation and 7% didn’t want to get the perpetrator in trouble, which possibly occurs because the attackers are familiar people, a family member or a close friend. This occurs the most in assault by a family member where the victim doesn’t want to create issues in the family, and believe that the family would separate if they came out and talked about it. Others fear that it would lead to even more assault if the police aren’t able to help and choose to live with it. It could also be the case if they were told so by the preparators, a trick younger people fall for: if you tell the police, I’ll hurt you even more

Another type of crimes that are rarely reported to the police are cybercrimes, which are criminal activities committed using a computer, or any device, especially to illegally access, transmit, or manipulate information. In 2016, only about 25% of cybercrimes were reported by victims, leaving the other 75% dealing with the crimes without the police. These victims choose to report these crimes to other institutions or even keep to themselves.

A large component of cybercrime is sextortion, which an FBI agent describes as: a serious crime that occurs when someone threatens to distribute another person’s private and sensitive material if there are not provided with images of sexual nature, sexual favors, or money. The preparator may also threaten to harm close family and friends using information they collected. They obtain such information by lurking in chat rooms and recording young people who post or live-stream sexually explicit images and videos of themselves, or they may hack into electronic devices using malware to gain access to files and control the web camera and microphone without the person knowing it.

These crimes are expanding, largely because they are much harder to keep track with. A person can easily take on an identity of someone else and there won’t be a way to verify who they really are. Also, preparators tend to go after young social media users because they are easier to fool, and are less likely to report anything they’re suspicious of. In addition, in terms of money, in the darkest realms of the web, there is the bitcoin, a type of digital currency, which transactions are much harder to record and maintain. Lastly, cybercrime is a new aspect to the criminal world, which means that there aren’t any set divisions that are responsible for handling such crime and there aren’t as many laws passed about this issue

Thus, all these criminals are able to walk away without being caught. They then realize that they’re committing the crimes blindly and go on to do it even more. Feeling that the police wouldn’t be much help if they were told about these crimes, the victims believed that they can do a better job by either complying with the activity, or by reaching out to other individuals for assistance and emotional support.

Those cybercrimes that do get reported to the police often times are unsolved due to lack of developed strategies to approach the activity. Online crime is a fairly new concept to the forces, and they haven’t fully grasped the types of crimes that occur and how they can handle them. There are no traditional physical threats that the police can approach leaving officials unclear on multiple aspects. Who is in charge of cybercrimes? Who investigate them? What are the exact violations? Most importantly, how can they confront it? Police chief in Tucson, Chirus Magnus stated that such, “lack of clarity” makes it, “incredibly challenging” to handle those crimes. 

Will the lack of reported crimes change?

In an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Mayor Bill de Blasio stated that, “you have to go back to the 1950s to see crime this low.” He was referring to the low numbers of murders, shootings, burglaries, robberies and auto thefts, as measured by the police CompStat tracking program. However, there are multiple other offenses unconsidered in these measurements, including sexual assaults and cybercrimes. Why is the mayor and the NYPD ignoring these unreported crimes? Is it because they don’t think that their crimes are of importance to the police force? Do they think that these crimes are left to be handled by a different division? Or are they not proud to mention them, because they can’t combat the issue? Are they ignoring these crimes to protect their public image? It seems quite obvious that these crimes are left in reported, for reasons that work only for the benefit of the government. It leaves people to make the decision that , if public official statements fail to reflect the true rate of crime in America, what chance do officials have of learning the true rate of crime. Can we still proudly say that the American police force, truly fights for a citizen’s justice. Also, if the forces keep such crime unaccounted, then this phenomenon of underreporting and mistrust in the police will only amplify in the upcoming years.

Therefore, administrations and police forces have to understand that as some crimes decline other arise. There are more crimes than what the police sees in the surface, that need to be fully captured by the law enforcement’s reporting systems and require full preparation to handle. They need to fully understand, investigate and properly respond to sexual assaults. If the police are not familiar with reading a rape kit or understanding a women’s body. Then, these two aspects should be added to the teaching agenda in police academy. Also, there should be more attention towards cybercrimes. It needs to be publicly recognized as a crime that should be handled by the police. Also, there should definitely be more policies regarding online sexual crime and exploitation.

Crimes are changing every day, and they all should be considered of importance by both victims and the police, and if we keep to the traditional understanding to what crime means there will be a great gap between the victims and the police.

Filed Under: Law and Crime

ACADEMIC SOURCES

1. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0160072
2. https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/vnrp0610.pdf
3. https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2209&context=gc_etds
4. https://www.rainn.org/statistics/criminal-justice-system

POPULAR SOURCES

1. https://journalistsresource.org/studies/government/criminal-justice/crime-unreporting-emotional-distress-police-response/
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3. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/nyregion/cyber-crimes-unreported.html
4. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/millions-of-crimes-go-unreported/
5. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/23/us/rape-victims-kits-police-departments.html
6. https://www.fbi.gov/video-repository/newss-what-is-sextortion/view