The San Francisco Police Department cleared 14 percent of rape cases last year—half the national rate. An investigation finds that rape kits get tested fast, only for cases to be quietly shelved. Often, the only thing standing “between a report and the shelf” is what’s known as a “pretext call,” a recorded phone conversation in which a survivor tries to extract an admission of guilt from their attacker (aka relives their trauma to do the police’s work for them):
She sat in a room at the SVU headquarters with [Sergeant Johnathan] Ng and a recorder. She dialed the man she alleged raped her. He didn’t pick up. She tried again. No answer.
“If we don’t get an admission, it’s a he-said, she-said thing,” she remembered Ng telling her.
Then, she said, he offered some unsolicited advice.
“He told me that I probably shouldn’t be hanging out with 55-year-old men,” she said.
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