Undercounting
Kirsty Johnson and Chris Knox have a report in the Herald today on why the number of unresolved reports of sexual assault has gone up.
On the face of it, one could assume the driver behind the spike in unresolved cases was the overall increase in reporting rates. Data shows reporting has also climbed steadily since last decade.
That’s what I would have assumed. It’s true in a sense. But the change wasn’t more reporting to police; it was more reporting by police. Many cases where the police felt they could not get a conviction were classified for reporting purposes as not being reports of a crime and so were lumped together with false accusations and cases where the reported behaviour wasn’t criminal.
It’s good news that the police don’t do this any more, but it’s also important that the past minimisation of reports is now more widely known.
[I should also note that reporters show their working: there’s a page on the data and calculations, and plenty of links to police documents and other sources. ]
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »