|
Ah, yes, so if you are a victim of a violent crime (let's say, someone mugged you at gunpoint, but did not bruise you - just held you at gunpoint until you surrendered your wallet), it seems perfectly reasonable for the police to hold your phone for weeks or months, searching through all of your photos (including the occasional nude photo of your spouse), in order to MAYBE find that one of your contacts might be a culprit of the theft? Maybe you delete the nude photos (you are really not comfortable with other people getting to see your naked spouse), but police notice you deleted some photos. How do they not know those aren't evidence of your mugger? They tell you the case is invalid, since deleting photos seems suspicious. Does not seem fair enough to me. The incidence of false accusation of rape is fairly low - depending on the statistic you find and country, either less than or roughly at parity with accusation of other crimes - between 2 and 10 percent [1]. Remember that the reporting of rape or sexual assault is low, compared to other crimes - I personally know several women who regularly sport bruises from their abusive partner, but who refuse to turn them in (and I am in no position to turn them in - the choice is entirely up to the victim and will backfire in my losing any ability to help them in the future, if I do). The cases of false rape accusations, however, tend to be highly visible, since they are often made by a desperate woman seeking to profit off a rich celebrity. Meanwhile, just like car accidents, the media tends to report only the most gruesome crashes/rapes, since this is an event that happens so often that reporting it every time is not newsworthy. [1] https://www.nsvrc.org/sites/default/files/Publications_NSVRC... |
If we use the same definition as for conviction, ie proven beyond reasonable doubt that a crime did not occur, you get similar single digit. In one case it is the court that define proven beyond reasonable doubt and in the other the police, but they more or less is the same single digit of the total number of reported cases. We can assume that the police definition is a bit less strict than the court, but how much is just speculation.
We could use the rate in which prosecutor deem a case likely to succeed and thus brings it to the court and compare that to the rate which police finds it proven beyond reasonable doubt that the crime did not occur, but we will still end up with a huge rate of false reports.
Which is why people tend to compare the total number of reported cases vs those that police finds is proven (with evidence) beyond reasonable doubt that the crime did not occur. This makes the number of false report very low, and where the 2-10% comes from. To me that is just not very sincere approach.