Sixty percent of rapes went unsolved by the New York City Police Department last year in 2020, the highest rate of unclosed rape cases since the department began publicly releasing that data in 2018. The decline in arrests took place even as the number of reported rapes dropped from 1,794 in 2018 to 1,427 in 2020.
The slump came to light during a more than four-hour long City Council Oversight hearing Monday morning where more than a dozen women and relatives of victims of rape and sexual assault provided heart-wrenching testimony about the hurdles they faced when they tried to report their rapes to the NYPD.
“I’m giving you guys everything, everything and I’m calling so diligently, so promptly, showing up to things promptly, making sure I have everything that’s important to this case and it just lands on nothing,” said a woman named Christine, who testified during the council's public safety committee hearing. She declined to provide her last name. “To see the values ‘courtesy, professionalism and respect’ on every police car is an insult to my experience.”
Christine described being drugged and raped by someone she met at a bar in September of 2020. She reported what had happened and provided investigators a detailed outline of everything she remembered. She said she later learned no investigator had gone to the bar to retrieve surveillance footage, though they did make her call her rapist on a recorded call where he yelled at her and called her stupid, further humiliating and traumatizing her. The case was closed without her knowledge.
“She was in essence her own detective,” said a dismayed Councilmember Adrienne Adams. “How in heaven’s name can we allow a survivor to pick up her own case, track her own case, offer her own evidence, spend her own money and this division comes back and slaps her in the face again.”
NYPD Deputy Inspector Michael King, head of the Special Victims Division, promised to flag the case for investigators to look again.
“Many of our cases are closed due to either the complainant maybe not wanting to go forward or us not being able to prove that force was used in the case,” King said. “It comes down to a lot of different variables with the cases. It’s very difficult to pinpoint just one reason why.”
A spokesperson for the NYPD didn’t return a request for further comment.
Christine’s experience echoed the testimony of many other women and family members of rape survivors who testified Monday. It also was reminiscent of long-standing issues of understaffing and poor training within the Special Victims Division, documented in a scathing report by the city’s Department of Investigation in 2018, and a subsequent investigation with the New York Times earlier this year.
The 2018 report recommended the NYPD double the number of detectives assigned to handle adult sex crimes, citing a case load 20 times higher than homicide detectives. Data from 2020 showed there were roughly the same number of people investigating those cases and fewer specialized detectives doing so, though King said they’d case load had been decreased by 50 percent since the report, to about 46 cases a year per person.
“No matter how much we have done we have much work that needs to be done,” King said.
The slump in rape arrests was parallel to an overall decline in reported crimes that resulted in an arrest in 2020, as the COVID pandemic upended normal life. Overall the percentage of crimes that ended in an arrest dropped to 26 percent. Thirty-eight percent of murders went unsolved last year, up from 22 percent in 2018.
At the Monday hearing, NYPD officials also said that a third of the Special Victims Division had not yet been trained in the specialized sensitivity and trauma informed interviewing training they were required to get by a 2018 law. Deputy Inspector King said 213 officers had been trained, and that a remaining 104 special victims division officers still needed it. They cited a lapsed contract and the COVID-19 pandemic as causes for the delay.
“[Officers in the SVD] are overworked and undertrained,” said Councilmember Helen Rosenthal, adding she saw no change since the 2018 report spurred reform efforts. “No, nothing is different.”
Meghan, who asked that her full name not be used, gave tearful testimony, describing her rape in a Brooklyn park six years ago. Her rapist got her pregnant, in one of her earliest sexual encounters. Investigators wanted to call her rapist on the phone for a recorded phone call, similar to what Christine asked to do. She was too afraid to do it, and investigators later closed her case.
“I never had a say in the decision to prosecute my rapist,” she said. “It was decided with SVU detectives without me.”
Another woman Rachel Izzo, a nurse, described her sexual assault by an NYPD investigator assigned to investigate a prior rape. Her account was previously detailed in a Newsweek report from 2018.
“They closed my case without ever speaking to my rapist,” she said. “When I called the precinct...for a follow-up, a female detective answered the phone and said, 'Your case is closed, Rachel, don’t call here any more.'”
