NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Nearly 100 calls to report rapes this year have been quickly downgraded from emergency status, leaving survivors to wait hours for police — and, increasingly, to leave before officers arrive, a New Orleans newspaper and TV station report.
The change is highlighted in a report that City Council crime analyst Jeff Asher is to present to the council this week, WWL-TV and The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate reported.
Other serious crimes, including armed robberies, carjackings, aggravated assaults and domestic disturbances, are also often being shifted from high to low priority before police arrive, Asher wrote.
Advocates and officials are worried that the long waits raise the emotional cost for rape survivors, and the chance that the reports won't be investigated.
The changes come at a time when the department has fallen from 1,300 officers to about 950. The reasons are not clear, but authorities appear to be trying to keep lights-and-siren treatment for still unfolding emergencies, the news agencies reported.
So far this year, 98 aggravated rape reports — 40% of the total — have been reclassified from emergencies to non-emergencies while the call was being dispatched.
The same thing happened with 1,486 domestic disturbances, 431 domestic batteries, 252 aggravated assaults and 74 armed robberies or carjackings, Asher wrote.
Dispatch call logs of rape complaints suggest that some were downgraded because there didn't appear to be any immediate danger. One was a 15-year-old girl who said she had been sexually assaulted 10 years earlier. No one was there when officers arrived three hours later, so the case was closed, call logs indicate.
Conversely, a caller on June 27 told police that she had been raped and her attacker was following her. Terse dispatch notes aren't clear about the first officers' arrival time, but the dispatcher didn't call the sex crimes unit until four hours after the initial call, the report said. By then, the case was marked “gone on arrival.”
In January, a pregnant woman called from a medical facility at 3:47 p.m. to report she had just been raped. At 5:18 p.m., a nurse called to tell police the woman had left. Officers arrived at 6:56 p.m. and marked the case “gone on arrival.”
City Council member Helena Moreno said such cases were disturbing and might never be officially reported.
“Response times are taking so long that now it’s even hard to track the victim, find the victim," she said. "And now these cases are not even reported. They just … poof.”
Quick downgrades were half as frequent in 2018, when response times were much shorter, the news agencies reported.
Police must try to locate the caller any time a sex crime or child abuse is reported but the caller cannot be found, said department spokesman Gary Scheets.
When that fails, the incident is left open but inactive, he said. It was not immediately clear what happens to cases with that status.
Scheets confirmed that calls reporting older incidents could be downgraded but wouldn't say whether that is decided by police or the Orleans Parish Communications District, which runs the 911 dispatch center.
Advocates say that the downgrading of any rape allegation is distressing, whether or not the call was made immediately.
Survivors could still be in danger — homeless, or living with the attacker, or putting the safety of children or others ahead of their own, said Katie Hunter-Lowrey, an organizer with the Promise of Justice Initiative.
There can be many reasons for a survivor to leave before police arrive, said Morgan Lamandre, local policy and compliance director of Sexual Trauma Awareness & Response, or STAR.
“A survivor who works, has children, no transportation or a number of other obligations may not have time to wait around all day for someone to show up to take a report,” she said.
Less than 25% of sexual assaults are ever reported, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
“It takes an incredible amount of stamina for sexual assault survivors to report to law enforcement,” Lamandre said.
A recent report commissioned by the New Orleans Health Department showed that city police clear 5% of sex crimes and have a caseload three times the recommended average.
That figure does not include rapes that wind up uncounted because the victim could not be located.
Mary Claire Landry, executive director of New Orleans’ Family Justice Center, said she thinks police are making an honest effort. “I think they’re doing their best,” she said.
She said it has long been clear that not all calls rise to the level of criminal prosecution.
“But at the very least,” Landry said, “we should be investigating them and responding to them.”
Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
