What Rape?

Rape detectives with the Atlanta police kept the same secret as their counterparts in St. Louis: They weren't investigating every rape claim made to them.

It wasn't a lot of cases: An audit turned up 34 that got little or no follow-up, and weren't counted as crimes, in 2000. The victims tended to be prostitutes and addicts, typically women whom investigators said they couldn't locate after an initial hospital visit.

Atlanta Police Chief Richard J. Pennington recommended discipline for nine officers -- and a grand jury has subpoenaed witnesses in an inquiry into whether failure to investigate rape complaints violated Georgia law.

In the extreme, some officers could face felony charges punishable by prison.

What set St. Louis apart from Atlanta is that its Sex Crimes Section shredded previous years' paperwork, making it difficult to know how long -- and to what extent -- the department kept such complaints out of the public domain.

At the request of the Post-Dispatch, Louis Arcangeli, one of the Atlanta police officials who blew the whistle on his department's practice, reviewed a selection of St. Louis cases.

He noted that in both cities, many of the women making those complaints were prostitutes or drug addicts.

"Certainly, detectives were being selective about the ones they chose to write memos on, but they can't make that judgment, " Arcangeli said. "You have to record them. You have to go through the proper process of 'unfounding' it. You can't just leave it in a memo."

He said that the St. Louis memos generally seemed more detailed than those written by their Atlanta counterparts and that they appeared to be done with supervisors' support, which wasn't the case in Atlanta.

"On some level, they were doing due diligence" in St. Louis, he said. "But then, of course, they started getting to judgments, which is where things started to go wrong."

At least Atlanta kept permanent records and could re-examine shelved cases after the practice was exposed, Arcangeli noted. By shredding memos, St. Louis police hurt local, and possibly national, efforts to link unsolved crimes with DNA or other methods, he said.

Arcangeli scoffed at a recurring theme in St. Louis and Atlanta files: A detective suspends a rape investigation and withholds an official report because he can't locate the complainant. "When police don't want to do a case, the classic line is, 'I left a business card at her address, '" he said. "You see that consistently through these cases."

Atlanta police commanders were first made aware of their cases in early 2001, when Detective Lisa James openly questioned why her colleagues were dumping complaints into a file drawer instead of processing them as official reports.

Inflated success rate

"If someone makes an outcry of a crime that has been committed, or has happened to them, that's an outcry, that's a crime, " James said in an interview. "The police department's responsibility is to protect people. If you cover it up and fail to report it, you're doing them a huge disservice. That's your job -- to report crimes.

"I wasn't going to be made to do something that was illegal or wrong, " she said.

Deflating crime statistics was only a byproduct in Atlanta, she said; the primary motivation was to lighten investigators' load and make it appear they were solving a higher percentage of cases.

A prosecutor was checking whether officers had violated their oath to uphold the law, which is a felony in Georgia; Missouri has no equivalent law.

Risk of serial rapes

In Atlanta, the harm caused went beyond skewing crime statistics, Arcangeli said.

DNA samples that might have helped to nail serial rapists were never tested, he said. Patrol officers weren't told about crime reports in their precincts.

In January, Atlanta-area serial rapist Christopher Baker was sentenced to 10 consecutive life terms. Arcangeli and James said later that the city's sex crimes detectives had unwittingly helped Baker avoid detection by disregarding rape complaints by prostitutes.

"In . . . Atlanta, when police were making those decisions regarding prostitutes, there were serial rapists operating who were not detected because police were not accepting the information that (the FBI) said they should be accepting, " Arcangeli said.

"So if there is not a serial rapist in St. Louis, it's because maybe they were lucky, but it's not because of best-practice by the Police Department."