Police Failure to Investigate Sexual Assault Is Endemic. Where Is DOJ?

Raped on a dinner date by a man she met on a dating app, Alicia Franklin, a Black woman, immediately went to the Memphis Police Department, desperate for her perpetrator to be brought to justice. Despite collecting evidence that would have allowed officers to quickly find Franklin’s rapist, law enforcement officials let her rape kit sit on the shelf for months. It took nearly a year before DNA testing came back with a positive match.

The same day that a forensics team completed DNA testing on Franklin’s rape kit, police found the body of Eliza Fletcher, a white woman who went missing while on a jog near the University of Memphis. In contrast to Franklin’s almost yearlong wait, police processed evidence found on Fletcher’s body within hours of her discovery. The results showed that the same man who raped Franklin had now raped and murdered Fletcher, 11 months after Franklin initially reported her rape to the police.

The tragic story of Alicia Franklin and Eliza Fletcher is not an isolated one. While a local judge dismissed Alicia’s lawsuit against the city, thousands of rape victims in Memphis last year joined together in a class action, alleging that the city is at fault for not processing 12,000 rape kits between 1985 and 2014. One of these women is Debby Dalhoff, whose rape case hasn’t been solved since she reported it to the Memphis Police Department in 1985. “They let perpetrators run free that could’ve been in jail,” she told a local journalist. “They’ve destroyed so many women.”

Last year, after four Memphis police officers brutally beat and murdered Tyre Nichols—an unarmed Black man—the Justice Department opened a pattern-and-practice investigation into the Memphis Police Department. Authorized by federal statute, these investigations take place when there is “reasonable cause to believe” that a government agency consistently commits civil rights violations. In justifying the investigation, the DOJ pointed to the MPD’s excessive use of force, aggressive escalation of traffic stops, and unnecessary deployment of specialized units.

Nowhere in this announcement, however, is any mention of the Memphis Police Department’s profound failure to investigate gender-based violence. This is not altogether surprising: The DOJ’s own explainer on pattern-and-practice investigations does not mention gender-based crime when detailing which issues may be considered during these investigations.

This does not mean, of course, that the Department of Justice turns a blind eye to how law enforcement agencies treat cases involving gender-based violence. After all, its August 2016 report on the Baltimore Police Department, March 2023 report on the Louisville Metropolitan Police Department, and open investigation into the NYPD’s Special Victims Unit reflect the DOJ’s growing willingness to confront police departments that fail to adequately protect women.

Nonetheless, the lack of explicit language regarding sexual assault in its public-facing guidelines, in addition to the dozens of pattern-and-practice investigations that make no mention at all of gender-based crime, suggests that DOJ officials frequently overlook their ability to hold law enforcement officers accountable on this issue.

This is especially egregious when one considers how well established it is that law enforcement agencies consistently fail to handle gender-based crime. In Austin, a DNA testing center was closed for months, leading rape kits to go unprocessed. In Chicago, between 80 percent and 90 percent of sexual assault reports made to the city’s police department in the previous decade did not result in an arrest. Out of the more than 1,000 sexual assault cases reviewed by the Minneapolis Star Tribune, police conducted a background check on the suspect only 10 percent of the time. Lawsuits filed against police departments in San Francisco and Greenwich, Connecticut, furthermore, have criticized law enforcement agencies for failing to conduct victim interviews, pursue leads, and retrieve important evidence.

The failure of law enforcement officers in this regard facilitates more gender-based violence. Because many police officers treat sexual assault crimes as low priority compared to other crimes, rapists get away more often than perpetrators of any other violent crime. In addition, more than two-thirds of police officers questioned in a 2018 report admitted they had no training on how to read rape kit results, and a CNN investigation revealed that law enforcement agencies disposed of evidence in 400 sexual assault cases before the statute of limitations had run out. In those cases where evidence is properly gathered, detectives sometimes view rape survivors skeptically based on their emotional response during questioning, leading prosecutors to drop otherwise winnable cases. When DNA is untested or cases are dropped, rapists go on to commit more rapes.

The failure of law enforcement agencies to resolve sexual assault cases, which increases the reluctance of victims to report what happened to them, occurs on a systemic scale. When law enforcement officers do not investigate and prosecute these crimes, not only is justice not served, but victims’ constitutional rights to due process and equal protection are infringed.

For this reason, the Department of Justice should mandate that pattern-and-practice investigations include an analysis of how police departments respond to gender-based violence. While these investigations are not perfect, they do make an impact. A study of 23 police departments that agreed to consent decrees found that the average number of civil rights suits filed per year against the law enforcement agency in question dropped between 23 and 36 percent after the federal investigation.

Moreover, oversight has proven to be an important tool in compelling police departments to change their practices. After investigative journalism revealed untested rape kits in Phoenix, the Phoenix Police Department applied for federal grants that facilitated the processing of these cases. In Pennsylvania, the Women’s Law Project conducts a yearly case review of uninvestigated sexual assault claims, helping to limit the state’s rape kit backlog. The Baltimore Police Department, for its own part, responded to the DOJ’s 2016 report by processing rape kits at a higher rate and by increasing consistency in its data documentation procedures. And within three years of a settlement with sexual assault victims, the Austin Police Department announced it had eliminated its rape kit backlog.

Victims of gender-based crime deserve to have their stories heard, their cases investigated, and their offenders prosecuted. History shows that when law enforcement agencies’ mistakes are publicized and their policies are overseen by external actors, they do a much better job at dealing with gender-based violence. Along these lines, the Department of Justice must, in all its pattern-and-practice investigations, assess how law enforcement agencies treat gender-based crime. As a first step toward this, the Department of Justice should call out the Memphis Police Department for its profound failure to investigate cases of sexual assault. Doing so will increase women’s trust in law enforcement, stop the brazen behavior of perpetrators who too often escape punishment, and move us closer to a world where women like Alicia Franklin and Eliza Fletcher are safer from violence.