NOPD’s rape clearance rate is at a decade-plus low. What does this mean for the consent decree?
NEW ORLEANS — After she began to wonder if her own sexual assault case would ever be solved, Julie Ford decided to look into how the New Orleans Police Department handled other crimes of sexual violence. In 2018, she came across a national news story on clearance rates for rape cases and proceeded to request data for NOPD’s own rates. What she found surprised her.
At the time, NOPD’s clearance rate for such cases was barely above the single digits, according to data the department submits to the FBI each year. The numbers didn’t give Ford much confidence in her own case, which she declined to discuss in detail. But the statistics did lead her to ask more questions. She started to spend long hours looking at crime data, reading through government reports and trying to figure out what was happening in the department’s sex crimes and child abuse unit — the Special Victims Section — all in hopes of improving experiences for other survivors of sexual violence.
Six years later, Ford is perhaps one of the city’s most knowledgeable watchdogs on how the NOPD investigates sex crimes. She’s monitored the ebb and flow of reforms ushered in under the department’s long-running federal consent decree; earlier this year, she caught an error in which NOPD underreported hundreds of rape crimes to the FBI. And she’s still tracking NOPD’s rape clearance rates, which have plummeted even further over the past several years.
In 2013, the year the department first entered the consent decree, an all-encompassing reform agreement the city made with the U.S. Department of Justice, the clearance rate was at 40%. By last year, with 681 rape cases reported and 46 cases cleared, the rate had sunk to 6.75%. For comparison, the recent national average for peer agencies is about 35%, Ford found.
