Baltimore County reports one set of sexual assault data to the FBI. They tell the public another story
A Baltimore Banner analysis of federal and local police data shows Baltimore County’s end-of-year crime numbers leave out more than half of all rape cases investigated since 2021
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There were 185 rape cases when the Baltimore County Police Department reported their official 2022 crime statistics to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But when annual crime figures made their way to the public, almost half the rape cases had disappeared — the number was now 90.
Over at least the last two years, Baltimore County’s official annual crime numbers — which the county cites in public messaging about crime trends — have included just a portion of rape cases police actually investigated.
That’s because police have included only rape cases that meet an antiquated definition of rape, updated a decade ago, — despite the federal definitionthat definition in the federal criminal code being updated a decade ago — when releasing what BCPD calls its official annual crime statistics.
For more than a half-century, law enforcement authorities only classified forcible vaginal penetration as rape. But in 2013, the federal definition criminal code was updated to include sodomy and forcible penetration sexual assault with an object. The amendment also made the law apply to “any person.”
County officials have been using the older definition when talking about the rape cases police investigate yearly; that’s because BCPD excluded more than half of rape cases from 2021 and 2022 crime statistics the county executive has been sharing with the public, according to a Baltimore Banner analysis.
BCPD and County Executive Johnny Olszewski Jr.’s office rely on crime statistics from BCPD’s selected offense report, which police said represents “crime trend indicators for strategic planning,” to publicly message crime numbers.; Olszewski relied on that data when trumpeting a purported 16% one-year drop in violent offenses during the county’s deadliest year on record.
The selected offense report is what its name implies: selected. BCPD chose to track only forcible rape (vaginal penetration) rape cases, despite forcible rape, sodomy, and sexual assault with an object all counting as rape crimes under the current FBI definition.
That practice differs from how county authorities count other crimes. Publicly- disclosed theft numbers, for example, aggregate a variety of crimes under the same umbrella: shoplifting, theft from a motor vehicle, theft from a building and larceny.
Experts say the same should be done for rape, and that it’s unusual for law enforcement agencies not to.
Rachel Lovell, director of Cleveland State University’s Criminology Research Center, said she had “never heard of parceling out the criminal code for rape.” and certain crimes.
To do so diminishes the seriousness of the crime, Lovell said, and says to survivors, “‘wWe don’t consider what happened to you rape.’”
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In January and March, BCPD officials denied that they had been publicizing incomplete rape statistics and insisted that questions about the discrepancies were based on reporters’ misunderstanding of crime definitions.
On Wednesday, police spokeswoman Joy Stewart acknowledged in an email that statistics cited by public county officials counted just forcible rape and that they would now change their reporting process. It’s been the result of an “inadvertent misunderstanding” of rape as defined in the criminal code and “unintentional miscommunication regarding term definitions,” Stewart wrote.
“Moving forward, Baltimore County will plan to utilize” all forcible sex crimes “in reference to similar questions” about county crime statistics, she said.
It’s diminishing the crime in general ... and saying to them, ‘we don’t consider what happened to you rape.’ You’re in a sense erasing those victims.
Perception of rape, sexual assault could cripple survivor organizations
Experts say diminishing the number of rapes that actually occurred puts grant funding at risk for Baltimore-area advocates of sexual assault survivors, and could discourage reporting of sex offenses.
“Pushing a false narrative that things are better ... the messaging there can be really damaging,” said Amanda Rodriguez, executive director of TurnAround Inc., which works with sexual assault survivors in Baltimore County and the city, said.
“We could potentially have to limit services based on numbers they’re putting out,” the former Maryland prosecutor said. “And if the number is low, survivors could potentially feel uncomfortable coming forward.”
The pPolice dDepartment provided federally- reported crime statistics for 2021 and 2022 after requiring The Banner to file a request under the Maryland Public Information Act. Baltimore City makes this data readily available to the public. Even after this, the department violated the law, missing the deadline by which they were required to provide the records.
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The county’s online “public safety dashboard” displays forcible and non-forcible sex offenses from January 2021 through February this year — but those figures also differ from the stats used by officials in public remarks, further confusing county rape and sexual assault trends.
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“We’re thoroughly reporting our crime numbers in the area of sex offenses — including rape and sodomy,” he said.
In a Jan. 20 email after the interview, Stewart insisted that the public crime dashboard “is accurate and so is the data contained in the selected offense report.”
“Both provide an accurate snapshot,” she wrote. “As the title suggests, the ‘selected offense report’ is just that.”
Experts like Dean Kilpatrick, a professor of Ppsychiatry and Bbehavioral Ssciences at the Medical University of South Carolina, said the way authorities publicly discuss rape and sexual assault, and the prevalence of such crimes, have significant consequences.
“You’re constraining the definition of rape and sexual assault, and therefore you’re subtly teaching the public that these things don’t count as sexual violence,” Kilpatrick, who has researched sexual violence and circumstances surrounding it, said.
“As a public official, I would be very reluctant to declare victory without seriously considering that there may be a variety of other factors accounting for” the decrease, he added.
Stewart would not address experts’ criticism that publicly counting only a portion of rape crimes risks funding for sexual assault survivor advocacy organizations.
And, when asked to respond to Lovell’s claim that excluding certain rape offenses sends a message that police don’t consider sodomy and sexual assault with an object rape, Stewart again responded that “This inadvertent misunderstanding was the result of unintentional miscommunication regarding term definitions.”
Officials stress drop in rape, sexual assault cases
Comparing two years of BCPD’s federally-reported crime data, The Banner’s analysis still shows a sharp 33% decrease in county rapes since 2021. Baltimore City, by comparison, reported a 19% one-year decline in rape cases between 2021 and 2022.
Kilpatrick finds even a 33% one-year drop in rape cases dubious, unless it coincides with a higher percentage of reported rapes resulting in prosecutions and convictions.
Lovell said the reduction is also inconsistent with rates of rape nationally.
“That rate is way different than what you would see nationally and seems extremely high for a one-year change,” she said.
BCPD has not provided incident-level crime data to The Banner, even though the records were requested on Jan. 19, once again violating the state’s public records act. Baltimore City, by comparison, makes this data available on their Open Baltimore site.
Baltimore County authorities’ handling of sex crimes scrutinized for years
Baltimore County law enforcement has for years been in the spotlighted for how they investigate reports of rape and sexual assault and their few prosecutions of such offenses.
Baltimore County pPolice, for instance, routinely classified reported rapes as “unfounded,” according to a 2016 BuzzFeed News investigation. Baltimore County State’s Attorney Scott Shellenberger’s office declined to bring charges when the survivor did not physically resist — almost a decade after Maryland’s Court of Appeals decided physical resistance is not necessary for nonconsensual sex to be classified as rape, and two years after Maryland legislators made that court opinion law in 2017.
Amid swirling criticism of Baltimore County’s sex crime investigations in 2019, Olszewski established a sexual assault investigation task force — the second such task force in less than three years.
The task force found police unnecessarily considered whether victims physically resisted unwanted sexual advances, that law enforcement rarely tested evidence in rape cases, and that prosecutors often declined to file charges when allegations were not immediately reported.
Last year, the pPolice dDepartment and Shellenberger agreed to each pay $50,000 to settle civil claims that they violated a Towson University student’s First Amendment rights in 2018 when detectives and prosecutors intervened to prevent her from filing charges against three former University of Maryland, Baltimore County baseball players who she said sexually assaulted her.
Rodriguez, who’s has advocated in Annapolis for more resources for sexual assault and rape survivors and for new measures to improve policing of their cases, said that following the task forces’ audits, “to have [rape] numbers [of rape and sexual assault] counted in the same old way ... it is frightening.”
“The impact could be [more] far-reaching than people realize,” she said.
Clarification : This story has been updated to clarify what federal definition of rape changed in 2013
nick.thieme@thebaltimorebanner.com
taylor.deville@thebaltimorebanner.com
