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Why Not Report?
In comments to this post, C Stanley asked about rates of reporting for police harassment (racial and sexual). I can’t answer her question directly, but it does raise another important issue: why might certain wrongs be persistently underreported?
Guest-starring an excerpt from the incomparable Professor Martha Minow of Harvard Law School (so you know you don’t want to miss it).
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4 Responses to “Why Not Report?”
While the article discusses many of the subtle reasons for underreporting, it doesn’t directly address what to me is the most obviours: fear of reprisal.
Even before a case gets to trial, the police are quite likely to close ranks against an accuser of wrongfoing against one of them. I would be quite concerned if I needed to contact the local police precinct for assistance if,I had accused one of them of harassment in a previous incident.
If you are going to push for data reporting by the police, then why not report the arrest rates by race, ethnicity, and gender? Why not report the conviction rate by race, ethnicity, and gender? Why not report the crime statistics by zip code? (something that used to be much easier to find)
I find it odd that those who want data reporting of racial profiling by the police will go out of their way to avoid reporting of the demographic deata of who is actually commiting the crimes.
In Denver, you used to be able to look up the crime data for any neighborhood. But when the former Mayor Webb noticed that the highest crime neighborhoods were the black and hispanic parts of town, so the reporting stopped.
I haven’t had time to read your post in detail but skimmed it and so far I think most of it makes a lot of sense concerning reasons for underreporting. I guess I’m not clear on why minorities and women would be more likely to underreport than would white males who might also get roughed up or treated inappropriately by cops though (I’ll try to read the post more thoroughly later to see if there’s some explanation of why that might be so). If not, then even if the total number of incidents is underreported, I’d think that the distribution of types of complaint filers would still be telling (as to whether the inappropriate conduct by cops was due to racism, sexism, or just general thuggishness).
The subject concerns something NOT reported, and so, not directly measurable. At best, it can only be approached via interviews and studies of case histories.
Yet, questions are raised that could only be definitely answered by hard statistics or long-term and very sophisticated analyses utilizing complex cross correlations of case records and demographic information.
In the meantime, the information that is, in fact, available can produce useful pointers to quite valid
inferences. I don’t think we should wait for perfection in source material before trying to understand the subject. evem though addttiona; may help (or not).
Ecample: “…think that the distribution of types of complaint filers would still be telling …
Yes. It could be, but telling of what, vis-a-vis those who DON’T file complaints? If while females in area X file complaints at twice the rate of black males in area Y, we still know nothing about the number or ratio of WF or BM who DON’T report harassment.