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Abandoned rape kits identify over 800 serial rapists in one Michigan county

freep.com

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Re: Abandoned rape kits identify over 800 serial rapists in one Michigan county

#151
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, "serial" means "repeat" in this context. Specifically, TFA said that they defined "serial rapist" as those who raped 10-15 times without being caught.

The boingboing article says that, but the actual source (Detroit Free Press) article that underlies it makes it clear that the threshold is lower and the boingboing write-up is misstating the facts: “Of our set of 817 ... over 50 of them have 10 to 15 hits apiece.” https://www.freep.com/story/opinion/columnists/nancy-kaffer/...

Thank you for that correction, that's indeed very different and it's a shame the reporting is so sloppy

Re: Abandoned rape kits identify over 800 serial rapists in one Michigan county

#152
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not quite this dire, there are very competent public prosecutors and defenders. The problem is we accept the wealthy can obtain better and more lawyers, and effectively buy more or better justice as they define it. It's a classist system where justice is treated as a product rather than exclusively as a right.

It is pretty dire when you have a system that incentivized throwing the book at those near the poverty line, so that private prisons could continue to grow. It is crony capitalism, plain and simple.

I'm against the idea of private run prisons, it seems like something that should be the purview of the state given the lack of legitimate competition, market fundamentals, and ethical considerations.

But that said, is there any real data to support this claim you're making that private prisons incentivizes harsher sentencing of poor people? Besides maybe one or two "bad eggs" stories about judges. ie, data showing a legitimate correlation between the two as a general pattern...

This gets thrown around a lot on Reddit and elsewhere online but I really don't see how private prisons could influence criminal justice system at the other end.

Re: Abandoned rape kits identify over 800 serial rapists in one Michigan county

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to see all children get the message. I certainly raised my two adult sons exactly like that. The problem with your theory is that it is incredibly disempowering for women. I see this over and over and over. Everyone wants to cure "rape culture" for just one half of the equation. I don't think that works.

Look at the allegations made against Harvey Weinstein and Louis CK. Many of these women wanted to say no, but didn't feel able to. Teaching young men to respect the boundaries of women is clearly important, but we also need to give young women the confidence and skills to assert their boundaries.

It would also really help if people who aren't rapey bastards would step forward and open doors for women in terms of career instead of looking the other way, worrying that if they give a woman a leg up professionally there will be talk etc. That would do a lot to reduce the power that men like Harvey Weinstein wield. When that isn't done, women wind up with no one to negotiate with other than men who expect them to pay for their career advancement on their back.

If anyone needs a little insight on the matter, I will suggest reading Salma Hayek's testimony about Harvey Weinstein:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/13/opinion/contr...

Re: Abandoned rape kits identify over 800 serial rapists in one Michigan county

#155
post #39

> You're not going to find too many blond-haired, blue eyed white women ... Because their kits are treated differently, their cases are solved. That's just the way it is in this country. If you're a person of color, if you're a different economic class, then your case across the board, across the board, not just sexual assault — they're treated differently. And that's just the truth. People may not want to admit it,…

While I understand the sentiment is a common one, I disagree with the premise that these things are due to race. This is due to economic inequality, with race being used by the wealthy as a tool to pit the majority against each other, no different from how religion was used to label the pious and heathens. It's binary nonsense. There are parts of the country where you WILL find poor white people being treated the sam…

Given what I have heard of from older relatives in rural areas, this is "in the main" correct.

My aunt, quite old, remembers a time when corporal punishment (being hit with a sturdy broomstick, or rapped across the knuckles etc.) was OK in the school she attended. It was always the poorer kids that got the corporal punishment... not the better-off ones.

Re: Abandoned rape kits identify over 800 serial rapists in one Michigan county

#156
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is pretty dire when you have a system that incentivized throwing the book at those near the poverty line, so that private prisons could continue to grow. It is crony capitalism, plain and simple.

I'm against the idea of private run prisons, it seems like something that should be the purview of the state given the lack of legitimate competition, market fundamentals, and ethical considerations. But that said, is there any real data to support this claim you're making that private prisons incentivizes harsher sentencing of poor people? Besides maybe one or two "bad eggs" stories about judges. ie, data showing a…

According to Pew Research, as of 2015, ~126,000 prisoners (state & federal) were held in private prisons[1]. As best I can tell, there are/were 2.2 million prisoners in the U.S. at the time. So about 5.7% of the prison population.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/11/u-s-private-...

Re: Abandoned rape kits identify over 800 serial rapists in one Michigan county

#157
post #81
post #39

> You're not going to find too many blond-haired, blue eyed white women ... Because their kits are treated differently, their cases are solved. That's just the way it is in this country. If you're a person of color, if you're a different economic class, then your case across the board, across the board, not just sexual assault — they're treated differently. And that's just the truth. People may not want to admit it,…

This is a good case of how two important ideas are being conflated to the detriment of the larger lesson to be learned, I think. As far as I can tell, Prosecutor Worthy is making two arguments: (1) Black (assume PoC approx. equals black in this context) rape victims are treated differently than white ones. She bases this on the fact that 86% of unsolved victim cases are from black people (compared to ~40% of the popu…

Just to expand, even if it does turn out to be a race-based correlation (like we controlled for class, and the discrepancy was still present), we still don't know why.

One version is that a bunch of essentially similar cases come in, then the cases for white people are prioritized over the cases for PoC, because of racism. And therefore they get solved at a disproportionate rate. That's one potential explanation, that may have some potential solutions.

There are a bunch of different potential explanations though.

Maybe white people are more likely to be raped at parties, whereas PoC live in areas with less police enforcement so they are more likely to be raped by random strangers, so the crime is harder to solve.

Maybe black people are understandably less likely to talk to the police while they investigate anything, so it's harder to get witness testimony and the like.

Maybe there was a successful awareness effort targeted at black people, so they are now more likely to report when they are raped, whereas white people only report it when the case is especially egregious and egregious cases have more physical evidence.

I'm just making all these up to demonstrate that there are all kinds of potential explanations of why there's a difference between races even if the individual investigators try just as hard on these cases and the cases are assigned without bias. In basically all these cases the answer about how to improve this situation is different, so it's worth knowing the details. I think it deserves further study.

Re: Abandoned rape kits identify over 800 serial rapists in one Michigan county

#158
post #3

My god, how do you leave over 11k crimes just sitting in a store room... in one county. I'm glad they're addressing this gross miscarriage of justice. Hope it's an isolated thing (but not actually expecting it to be so)

Notice the uproar whenever people encounter the term "rape culture", yet when pieces like this come out, nobody puts two and two together: oh shit, maybe when people complain about rape culture, what they mean is that we don't take sexual assault half as seriously as we should.

I've noticed the same area with the vast majority of murders is also the same area as the vast majority of rapes, you are correct that it is a particular culture problem

Re: Abandoned rape kits identify over 800 serial rapists in one Michigan county

#160
post #69
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not when 82% of the population are African American.

The county is only 40% black. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/waynecountymich... And the kits were put in storage from 1984-2009, during which time the demographics of Detroit changed very rapidly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Detroit... It wasn't always 80% black.

The kits are from a Detroit Police warehouse. The rest of Wayne county has different police forces.

The oldest kit was from 1984, not all the kits.

Your Wikipedia chart shows Detroit has been at least 80% non-white since 1990.

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