Rape increase is ‘not a trend we’re too worried about,’ says NYPD captain

A New York City police captain said that the rise of rapes in his precinct doesn’t concern him because the majority of reported cases were perpetrated by someone whom the victim knew.

Captain Peter Rose leads the 94th Precinct, which includes the Greenpoint neighborhood in Brooklyn. The New York City Police Department reported a 62 percent jump in rapes in the neighborhood in 2016, with 13 rapes and attempted rapes. In 2015, there were eight. Rose told DNAinfo New York that while “every rape should be investigated,” there is a difference in the types of cases his department handles.

“Some of them were Tinder, some of them were hookup sites, some of them were actually coworkers,” Rose told DNAinfo New York. “It's not a trend that we're too worried about because out of 13 [reported attacks], only two were true stranger rapes.”

He later said publicly at a Community Council meeting that those situations of acquaintance rape don’t compare to those of stranger rape.

“They're not total abomination rapes where strangers are being dragged off the streets,” Rose said at the meeting. “If there's a true stranger rape, a random guy picks up a stranger off the street, those are the troubling ones. That person has, like, no moral standards.”

According to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, seven out of 10 rapes are committed by someone the victim knows. Twenty-eight percent of rapes are committed by a stranger and 45 percent by an acquaintance. Twenty-five percent are committed by a former spouse or boyfriend/girlfriend, 6 percent are committed by more than one person or the victim cannot remember, and 1 percent are committed by a non-spouse relative.

Several of the cases in Greenpoint included incidents where women reported being raped by men they had gone out with or men with whom they worked.

In the U.S, one out of every six women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape. That figure could also be higher, as there is a tendency not to report sexual assault.

Rose said many cases in his precinct don’t result in conviction because the victims stop cooperating. He said there are cases where a victim calls 911 or goes to a hospital, but then decides not to prosecute the rape. According to RAINN, 310 out of every 1,000 rapes are reported to police and only 57 of those alleged rapists are arrested. Only 11 cases will be referred to prosecutors and six rapists will be jailed.

RAINN statistics show that sexual violence perpetrators have frequently committed other crimes. Out of 1,000 rape suspects, 370 have at least one previous felony conviction. One hundred of those have five or more.

A study published in the peer-reviewed journal Violence and Victims found that 63 percent of rapists report committing multiple rapes.

This story was originally published January 6, 2017 at 4:15 PM with the headline "Rape increase is ‘not a trend we’re too worried about,’ says NYPD captain."