A shared goal but a difference in opinion about how to go about achieving that goal

A cognitively provocative essay. From An Epidemic of Disbelief by Barbara Bradley Hagerty. The sub heading is

What new research reveals about sexual predators, and why police fail to catch them

So the problem to be addressed is solving a specific category of crime. What quickly develops as a theme through the article is that the solution to the crime of rape is for police to believe accusers.

The deeper problem is a criminal-justice system in which police officers continue to reflexively disbelieve women who say they’ve been raped—even in this age of the #MeToo movement, and even when DNA testing can confirm many allegations.

Having done an inadvertent experiment with that approach on university campuses based on the Dear Colleague letter, we know that that approach is a non-starter. Despite what ideologues say, people lie all the time for all sorts of reasons ("it's my cousin's car").

I am wrestling with the article - it is well written, it has interesting information in it, and yet I think her solution is a hack ideological trope with marginal merit; "Believe the women". I am astonished at how callous she is towards individuals who are non-conforming with her agenda based on gender and class.

And how dismissive she is of realities which are actually pretty hard to ignore. And how she never tackles limits. For advocates, their singular objective is the ultimate good and there are no limits. In reality, there are of course dozens, hundreds of legitimate objectives and finite resources and so trade-offs have to be made. That is anathema to the true believer but inescapable for everyone else.

There is a tone throughout the article that the police are the bad guys because they do not believe all women completely. A tone which can only be sustained by ignoring the conditions, circumstances, and constraints within which police operate.
There is a sense of an privileged but uninformed outsider, dismissive or the common knowledge of actual practitioners, lecturing her inferiors on how it should be done.

There are always bad apples who should be drummed out but Hagerty does not provide any strong evidence that the root cause to low clearance rates for rape is that the police are disbelievers of women. Hagerty does inadvertently provide a lot of evidence for what are likely to be more consequential root causes.

The spine of the article is the number of instances across the nation where police departments have not been testing and recording the results of rape kits. When they get around to testing the backlog of kits, they are finding themselves able to clear many cases, highlighting the normal Pareto distribution where 20% of rapists commit 80% of rapes. Identifying a single perpetrator can clear multiple cases.

There are two aspects of this central structure which Hagerty does not really explore.

The first is a technology/cost issue. This is normal pattern in history. A new product or technology or approach is introduced. At first it is exceedingly expensive. Only a few can afford it. However, as the market expands, producers are able to ramp up volume and bring down per unit costs. The lower the costs, the more the product is picked up by consumers. Eventually the market is saturated with everyone using the product.

It is referred to as the S-curve and it describes all innovations. We normally talk about it in terms of products and technology but it applies to virtually anything.

Hagerty points out that one of the reasons that there is a backlog of rape kits is that when they were introduced, they were extraordinarily expensive.

Granted, testing a kit could cost more than $5,000 in the late ’90s and 2000s. But during part of that time, the state was paying police departments to send in evidence. And even when the cost of testing a kit dropped to less than $1,000, police still tucked away the evidence in storage. Ultimately, Cleveland would accumulate some 7,000 untested kits.

Given finite resources, money spent testing kits is money not spent on patrolling, or investigating murder, or any other innumerable objectively desirable activities. You make trade-off decisions.

One trade-off is between types of crime. Most people would prioritize the relative importance of crime as something like:

1) Murder
2) Grievous bodily harm assault/Rape
3) Large scale property destruction (arson)
4) Major theft
5) Minor theft
6) Quality of life issues
7) Ordinance enforcement

No police department anywhere allocates all their budget to only investigating murders. The money is spread across all crimes. What is the appropriate balance of that distribution is more a normative issue rather than a descriptive issue and is likely to change over time and by circumstance.

It is unreasonable, except for ideological zealots/true believers, to assert that spending more or less money on one category or another is inherently bad. It is a judgment call.

There is a second order of trade-offs beyond categories of crime and that is within categories of crime. For the relative small percentage of cases where police are able to muster sufficient evidence for a prosecution of a crime, there is a priority to spend resources only on those cases which are most likely to yield a conviction. Constraints of budget force trade-off decisions no one wants to make but have to be made none-the-less.

Use and testing of rape kits would be an interesting case study of the S-curve. Did cities which chose to bite the cost bullet and pay for high levels of testing early on in the S-curve end up seeing a rise in rape convictions and then a decline of rapes (as should happen because of Pareto distribution)?

We don't know but that would be compelling evidence if it were true. Hagerty collected a lot of information for this article. This is a linchpin piece of evidence. Did she not address it because the answer is no (greater use of rape kit testing did not lead to a rise in convictions and a decrease in rapes)? Or is that we don't know the answer?

Early on, Hagerty blithely turns aside from a very large percentage of all rapes.

From the moment a woman calls 911 (and it is almost always a woman; male victims rarely report sexual assaults), a rape allegation becomes, at every stage, more likely to slide into an investigatory crevice.

I am sure Hagerty must know about the problem of male rape. Depending on the researchers you follow, male rape victims are between 10-40% of all rape victims. There is a whole different sociology and issues around male victims, an extraordinary percentage of which occur within state facilities.

True to the true believer ethos, Hagerty comfortably ignores a whole demographic in pursuit of an ideological trope. As rare as are convictions for rape of women, convictions for rape of men are even more rare.

My appreciation of the article is that it is sufficiently information-rich that it points towards some alternative issues which should be considered even though she does not do so. I also think Hagerty has no familiarity with process improvement. I read her argument and found it profoundly unconvincing except at the margin.

But multiple other root causes leap to mind given the facts Hagerty is sharing.

It appears from her evidence that this is primarily a big-city issue. All the examples she provides are from large cities. Among the attributes of large cities which is usually true is that they are virtually all run by Democrats and have been for many decades. If all the cold storing of rape kits without testing them is occurring primarily in Democrat managed jurisdictions, then perhaps the issue is due to their partisan dominance?

I do believe that lack of political competition is a major problem. It is not, I don't suspect, an issue that Democrats are uniquely incompetent in managing cities or police departments. Rather, it is the lack of political competition. The same people in the same roles for long periods with no accountability is a recipe for inefficiency and ineffectiveness. It is a corruption issue arising from dominance, not a party issue per se.

So one obvious solution to poorly managed police departments might be more partisan competition at the city level where both parties can compete to better serve the public.

I don't think it likely that that would be viewed as an acceptable problem solving but it is a viable one.

A second approach would be to acknowledge that there is a huge class issue here. Hagerty sort of acknowledges it but treats it as an ancillary issue. I suspect it is the primary issue.

All you have to do is watch a few hours of the TV reality show COPS to see the storm of heterogeneity of human behavior. Or work retail for a week.

People behave badly all the time. The type of misbehavior varies by class and circumstance. In some places people would never call the police. In others, police are the first call to resolve social issues.

Given the hierarchy of crime types and the hierarchy of convictability, it would be natural for police, within their budget, and based on experience to prioritize some categories of crime over others and some specific cases over others. Ignoring that reality pulls all credibility from her argument.

The further you read into the article the more you feel like Hagerty is viewing the world not so much through tinged classes but markedly occluded glasses. She thinks that things should work this way, does not understand why they don't work this way and therefore concludes people must be bad. The police in particular. They simply don't believe.

But if you step back and take a problem solving approach to a flawed process, you end up with dramatically different answers, and likely more effective answers than just "Believe the women." Or Believe everyone.

"It's my cousin's car.

Oh, OK. You are free to go."

Broken windows is an obviously successful approach, proven out in hundreds of departments. Police the small items and you prevent the big ones. Want to reduce rapes and increase rape convictions? Do Broken Windows policing. It works. We know it works. We have a pretty good idea of why and how it works. Because it is ideologically unacceptable to the "Believe the women" wing of unreality, there is enormous opposition to Broken Windows policing by the Hagertys of the world but ideology should not preclude Broken Windows adoption given the reality of its results. Either you are serious about reducing rapes or you are serious about your ideological preening. Can't have both.

Rather than a massive training program of dubious effectiveness to teach all police to believe everyone, how about a massive research and training program to identify and monitor the signals within a case which increase or decrease the probability of finding the perpetrator or achieving a conviction. Especially the core perpetrators, i.e. identifying and targeting the 20% of the Pareto distribution who commit 80% of the crimes.

Hagerty get's lost in the drama of her own ideological language.

Since then, Detroit and other jurisdictions across the country have shipped tens of thousands of kits to labs for testing. The results have upended assumptions about sexual predators—showing, for example, that serial rapists are far more common than many experts had previously believed.

No, there aren't more serial rapists than we thought. The Pareto distribution, power laws, are always evident in sociology. All this evidence shows is that it is as real when we focus on rape as it is when we focus on any other human phenomenon.

What is usefully true is that testing those rape kits is suddenly an immensely effective means of targeting the 20% in a way which is not easily done in most other types of crime.

Another useful piece of information which Hagerty presents as new but is confirmation of an old reality is the issue of profiling.

Another surprise for police and prosecutors involved profiling. All but the most specialized criminologists had assumed that serial rapists have a signature, a certain style and preference. Gun or knife? Alley or car? Were their victims white, black, or Hispanic? Investigators even named them: the ponytail rapist, the early-morning rapist, the preacher rapist.

But Lovell recalled sitting in Cleveland’s weekly task-force meeting, listening to the investigators describe cases. They would say: This guy approached two of his victims on a bicycle, but there was this other attack that didn’t fit the pattern. Or: This guy assaulted his stepdaughter, but he also raped two strangers. “I was always like, ‘This seems so very different,’” Lovell said. “This is not what we think about a serial offender. Usually we think of serial offenders as particularly methodical, organized, structured—the ones that make TV.”

Eric Beauregard, a criminologist at Simon Fraser University who has interviewed 1,200 sexual offenders, says profiling may fail because a predator’s reality falls short of his fantasy. Most offenders tell him that they do hunt for a certain type of victim, but “what they had in mind and what they selected did not match at all,” he says. “If they are looking for a tall blonde with big breasts, at the end of the day, it was: She was there, she was available, she was alone. Those were the criteria.” Nathan Ford’s victims, for example, were black, white, Hispanic, and Asian; 13 years old and 55; on the west side of the city and on the east.

“Thank God we have DNA,” Dan Clark, one of the Cleveland investigators, says. “Because trying to put together a pattern where there is no pattern is impossible. It’s no wonder we didn’t catch that many people.”

Profiling has long been known to be of dubious effectiveness. Sometimes, some profilers, on occasion. But a reliable tool? No.

What Hagerty is showing with the evidence from the rape kits is that those disposed towards criminality are overwhelmingly opportunistic. You can reduce the inclination towards criminality or you can reduce the opportunity. Both are hard to achieve. On balance, though, you are usually better off going after the perpetrator than reducing the opportunity.

As the IRA said after an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Margaret Thatcher.

Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.

There will always be opportunity. There are a limited number of perpetrators. Go for the perpetrators. If you can effectively modify their behavior; great. If not, limit their access to the public. Via incarceration.

It is frustrating that Hagerty writes so well, has so much useful information and yet let's her ideological convictions drive her conclusions. She is misdirecting us towards an ambiguous and improbable root cause (police need to believe everyone) while ignoring many more credible approaches. It is frustrating that she does not explore the role of class in the process of influencing how police estimate probabilities of conviction.

As an example, say the police have $100,000 to invest in pursuing two rape cases, with the cost of a conviction being about $100,000. In one case the rape victim is in a poor community who are averse to dealing with the police. The community is characterized by low marriage rates, single parenthood, frequent money problems and minor convictions for drug use. In the other case the rape occurred in a wealthy, stable community where the residents are strong proponents of the police and are also eager to see the rapist convicted and will cooperate with the investigation. There are no distracting issues about debt, criminal convictions, or credibility, etc. for witnesses in this community. Both cases have about 75% of the evidence necessary for a conviction. You can only afford one case. Which do you investigate.

It is a wretched dilemma. We should investigate both. But we can't. In many instances the balance tips to the easiest to convict which means the poor don't get justice and the rich do.

Has nothing to do with believe everyone or race. It has to do with hard realities and probabilities.

In the article, it is hard not to feel like Hagerty sees a social justice issue involving misogyny and feminist theory leading to bad outcomes for victims with whom she sympathizes (definitely not male victims). I see process issues, constraints, trade-offs, and probabilities leading to bad outcomes.

In the first case the answer is to reeducate police. While I do not dismiss improving police procedure, I do not think indoctrination into ideological suppositions is the answer. Treat the problem like the process it is and go at it incrementally, improving all the leakage points from event to accusation to investigation to prosecution to conviction to incarceration. Target the 20%.

If your goal is to reduce rapes, you have to go with what is known to work and not waste time and resources indulging in the chimera of ideological fantasies.

As is so often the case, there is a shared goal but a difference in how to go about achieving that goal.