Originally written for the ILEETA Journal Improving police sexual assault training is the best way to hold offenders accountable A wolf who comes disguised as a friendly sheep is an apt description for the sex offender. Perpetrating their crimes and evading consequences through their ability to hide their real motivations is a defining feature of the sexually motivated criminal. Getting to the truth despite the deception should be the goal of a successful police investigation. The sad truth is that annually, an average of 433,648 sexual assaults are reported each year in the United States [1]. The problem for us as law enforcement is that less than 5% of these reported assaults lead to an arrest with less than 1% resulting in a felony conviction [2]. There is no disputing that sexual assaults are complex crimes with a number of mitigating factors that can complicate a successful prosecution but we as law enforcement can do better. We get better by spreading knowledge about the reality of sexual assault and dispelling the many myths surrounding these horrific crimes. SEXUALLY MOTIVATED OFFENDERS Officers should know that rape is the sexual expression of power and anger by the offender and more about dysfunction in the offender’s personality then it is about the sex itself [3]. Officers need to further understand that the challenge for the sex offender in committing their crime is that the nature of the crime makes it difficult for them to hide their identity, especially with the ever-increasing sophistication of DNA testing. This leaves the sexually motivated offender with two options to avoid apprehension. One, avoid being apprehended because the victim never reports the assault to law enforcement. Or two, avoid being apprehended because no one, including law enforcement, believes the victim when they do come forward. Why is this important to law enforcement? Because the officer who better understands how the sex offender operates will be in a better position to determine the truth and hold them accountable. Knowing that offenders look for vulnerable victims or for ways to make a victim more vulnerable is a key element of investigating sexual assault. Understand that the offender likely targeted your victim and anyone who on the surface may have a credibility issue would make for a more vulnerable target. Any attempt by an officer to assess the victim’s credibility prior to a thorough investigation plays right into the sex offenders hands because many of the surface level observations you make about that victim are the same vulnerabilities that the offender identified and is now trying to exploit. TRAUMA & MEMORY The other problem we have when law enforcement responds to sexual assault allegations is that many of the dynamics involved in sexual assault contradict officers’ previous experiences with criminal investigations. For one, officers learn early on working the street that body language and statement inconsistencies can be helpful in detecting deception. If I ask you if you have drugs in your pocket and you respond by refusing to make eye contact or telling me a story that’s jumbled with no logical sequence or you start sweating out of nowhere, I will come to suspect that you may have drugs in your pocket. Because these reactions are common in guilty suspects, officers tend to associate these observations with deception. The unfortunate problem for the sexual assault victim is that these same behaviors are also consistent with the behavior of someone who has recently experienced a traumatic event [4]. Officers should recognize that these behaviors are more indicative of someone who is under stress, not necessarily someone how who is being deceptive. The question is really, why is this person under so much stress right now? In the case of a sexual assault victim, what you may really be seeing is not deception but further evidence that a crime occurred. Further training on trauma’s effect on the brain can help officers to better understand exactly why the victim in front of them is behaving the way they way that they are. To end with, the only way to improve our response to sexual assault is to improve the training we give to officers. Too many of the training's I have attended came from the perspective of victim advocacy rather than that of law enforcement. They were great in educating me about the victim experience, but they could not provide the specific tactics and strategies needed to effectively investigate rape allegations. Where I really gained insight was meeting and attending training put on by veteran sex crime detectives who were able to show how they took their knowledge of sexual assault victims and offenders to conduct more effective investigations. Training geared specifically towards cops with an emphasis on who the offender is and how they operate is the best way for us to hold more sexually motivated offenders accountable. AuthorJim Twardesky is a veteran police detective and adjunct instructor for the Macomb Public Service Institute. He offers training on investigating child abuse and sex crimes, having lectured regularly on these topics since 2017. REFERENCES
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