At public forums and private focus groups throughout the city, victims told commission members that they felt alienated by their experience with police. Detectives lumped them into “textbook cases,” dehumanized them, seemed to care little about the investigation’s outcome and often looked on the victim’s account with skepticism, they said.
The latest rape charges against serial-killing suspect Anthony Sowell originated from a woman who told her story for the first time publicly in a Cuyahoga County courtroom last month. The woman, who was in court on a probation violation, trembled and sobbed uncontrollably as she told Common Pleas Judge Timothy J. McGinty that police laughed and mocked her when she reported that Sowell had raped her.
To shift the culture to a victim-centered approach, the commission calls for an overhaul of decades-old police policies and procedures — which ignore crucial topics like empathy for victims and the importance of advocates, instead focusing almost exclusively on evidence collection.
The panel called for the department to infuse compassion and sensitivity into its protocol to eliminate many of the social barriers to reporting sexual violence.
The city should immediately develop training on thorough and unbiased report-taking to help detectives earn victims’ often tenuous trust, the report said. And its suggested relocating the sex crimes unit to create a more victim-friendly environment to increase security and privacy for those reporting sexual assault.
The commission also urged the city to train its officers to deal with populations on society’s margins, such as drug addicts, the mentally ill or the mentally retarded. Police deem many victims in these most vulnerable groups to be less believable, uncooperative or difficult to find. Their cases are the least likely to move forward, according to a Plain Dealer review of thousands of police records.
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criticalculture liked this
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gematriya reblogged this from anthropophagous and added:
This is so incredibly wrong.
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anthropophagous posted this
