An investigation by national news outlets has raised concerns about whether the Honolulu Police Department is massaging its rape statistics to make it look like it’s solving more crimes than it actually is.
Of 379 rape cases opened in 2016, HPD reported that it had “cleared” 134 cases, or 35 percent — a rate on par with the national average. However, a closer look at the data shows that an arrest was made in only
11 percent of cases.
The remaining 24 percent of cases were cleared by “exceptional means,” a designation that crime experts say is supposed to be used sparingly to refer to cases in which law enforcement is prevented from arresting and charging an offender due to elements beyond their control, such as if the suspect died.
The data collection and reporting was conducted by news outlets ProPublica, Newsy and Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting for a story published last month called “When It Comes to Rape, Just Because a Case Is Cleared Doesn’t Mean It’s Solved Opens in a new tab.”
HPD spokeswoman Michelle Yu said the department wasn’t ready to comment on the report. “We are going to look into this more and find out more about what is happening and how things are being counted and classified,” said Yu.
As part of the investigation, the news outlets sent 100 public-records requests to the largest law enforcement agencies in the country. Honolulu’s police department is one of about a dozen agencies that had twice as many exceptional clearances as arrests in 2016.
The investigation found that police in other parts of the country overused or misused the “exceptional means” classification. Under the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, law enforcement is supposed to close a case through exceptional means only under the following four conditions: they must be able to identify the offender; have gathered enough evidence to support an arrest, make a charge and turn the case over for prosecution; know the offender’s exact location so that the suspect could be taken into custody immediately; and encountered circumstances that prevented them from arresting, charging and prosecuting the offender.
HPD has been under scrutiny Opens in a new tab locally for how it handles rape cases after police revealed that they had tested only 13 percent of rape kits submitted to them as evidence between the late 1990s and 2016. HPD has since tested most of those kits, but this latest report is likely to add to concerns.
