“Victim is Not Credible”: The Influence of Rape Culture on Police Perceptions of Sexual Assault Complainants

1 According to the Uniform Crime Reporting Handbook (Federal Bureau of Investigation, Citation2004), offenses are cleared either by exceptional means or arrest. The handbook states that “an offense is cleared by arrest, or solved for crime reporting purposes, when at least one person is 1) arrested, 2) charged with the commission of the offense, and 3) turned over to the court for prosecution (whether following arrest, court summons, or police notice)” (p. 79). The handbook indicates that there may be situations where law enforcement have investigated a complaint, exhausted all leads, and identified a suspect but cannot clear an offense by arrest. In these situations, law enforcement can clear the offense by exceptional means if the following criteria are met: (1) the investigation has identified the offender, (2) the location of the offender is known, (3) there is ample information to support an arrest, charge, and turning over to the court for prosecution, (4) and there are reasons outside law enforcement control that hinders arresting, charging, and prosecuting the offender. FBI guidelines on clearing cases for Uniform Crime Reporting purposes state that a case can be unfounded only if it is “determined through investigation to be false or baseless” (UCR Handbook; Federal Bureau of Investigation, Citation2004, p. 77). Cases in the category “investigation continuing” are those with ongoing investigations (see Spohn & Tellis, Citation2014).

2 Members of the research team (the two co-principal investigators and a graduate student at California State University, Los Angeles) read through each case file and recorded data in an SPSS data file. Coding protocols were developed by the co-principal investigators. The co-principal investigators reviewed a sample of the files coded by the graduate student to ensure that there was consistency and inter-code reliability (Spohn & Tellis, Citation2012b, p. 15). For further information on coding protocol, please see Spohn and Tellis (Citation2012b).

3 Because the decision to record information is at the discretion of law enforcement, case files included varying levels of information. In some cases, even specific report fields listed on the form (e.g., race, age) were left blank. Similar response pattern imputation was used to handle missing data. Moreover, the inability to verify the accuracy of the information in each file is a limitation. It cannot be known if the information provided by the officer accurately represents the experiences of those involved. This information, however, does accurately document the information that officers are aware of and find important to note.

4 There is reason to believe that not all SA victims who recant have filed false reports. SA complainants recant for a variety of reasons—recantation does not necessarily mean that an incident did not occur. For example, complainant recantation may be motivated by fear or lack of interest in moving forward with the case (Spohn & Tellis, Citation2014). Because recantation is a strong predictor of unfounding, police may use this knowledge/job experience and view recantation as a proxy for complainant lying—potentially contributing to questioning credibility. However, recantation alone is not evidence enough that a crime did not occur. The International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP, Citation2005) policy on investigating SA cases states that “the determination that a report of sexual assault is false can be made only if the evidence establishes that no crime was committed or attempted” and that “this determination can be made only after a thorough investigation” (p. 12).

5 Additional analyses were also conducted to examine physical evidence and complainant injury. Results did not approach or reach significance.