
Less than 4% of reported rapes, sexual assaults, and child sex abuse allegations in certain cities across the United States ever result in a sex crime conviction, an NBC News investigation found.
The results of the investigation — based on a review of thousands of documents from police departments, prosecutors and courts in cities from Los Angeles to Boston — underscore what many advocates, experts and some law enforcement authorities have long said: The system routinely fails to get justice for victims.
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NBC News and 10 local NBC stations spent more than a year tracing offenses from crime to conviction and found:
- Violent sex crimes have a lower arrest rate than most violent crimes.
- In Chicago, Black victims of sex crimes are the least likely to see a conviction.
- Those accused of violent sex crimes were often able to secure plea deals that would keep them off the sex offender list. This happens even in California, which usually prohibits the practice.
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Tracing convictions is “really hard because it’s a combination of several different databases that are not available directly to the public,” said University of Kansas School of Law research professor Corey Yung, who has specialized in this research for the last decade.
“Our system, from arrest for conviction to crimes, is not transparent. There’s no overarching data source like there are in other countries,” he said. “It makes it incredibly difficult, in criminal law, to know what’s going on, from reported crimes all the way to convictions.”
U.S. & World
Yung said greater awareness has still not translated to more perpetrators being held accountable.
Law enforcement agencies use different metrics to track crime resolutions. The FBI, for example, uses a “clearance rate,” which counts cases that are resolved by conviction or closed due to other factors. Prosecutors track the number of people presented to them with enough evidence to put a case together. Police departments measure the percentage of people arrested for a particular crime.
In its review, NBC News focused on a basic conviction rate: the total number of violent sex crimes reported to an agency and the number of people found guilty of those specific crimes.
But even looking at how police departments measure it — by arrest rate — shows that resolutions to violent sex crimes trail other types of crime.
The chart below shows that crimes of sexual violence had a lower arrest rate than drug and property crimes in 2023, the latest year of data available.
Experts say the number of sexual crimes reported to officials is an undercount of the crimes that occur.
“A fraction of cases that get reported to police, a tiny fraction, end up resulting in any kind of sentence for the person accused,” Northwestern University law professor Deborah Tuerkheimer, a former assistant district attorney in Manhattan, told NBC 5 Chicago. In her book “Credible: Why We Doubt Accusers and Protect Abusers,” Tuerkheimer said cases can be dismissed due to a host of factors, like failure to take a case seriously or constrained resources.
“Remember, too, that most sexual assault cases don’t get reported at all,” Tuerkheimer said. “One reason for that is what I call the credibility discount — the likelihood that someone will not be believed, or will be blamed, or will just be disregarded if that person comes forward.”
Tuerkheimer said it’s hard to get an accurate statistical picture of case resolutions nationwide because agencies vary considerably in their handling of sex crimes cases, including practices around charging, plea bargaining and conviction rates. But she said this particular type of crime tends to have fewer charges brought in the first place.
“Research shows that prosecutors tend to apply a standard of ‘convictability’ when determining whether to pursue charges in sex crimes cases. What this means is that prosecutorial decision-making is often framed by a sense of how jurors would be expected to react to the accuser’s account,” she said.
Kim Foxx, a former state’s attorney for Cook County, Illinois, said the emotional toll of recounting the crime can make the process difficult for victims. Foxx, herself a sex crime survivor, said she’s not surprised by the low conviction rate, because as with any case with few witnesses, it can be hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.
“Because of that — the deeply personal nature, what feels like the intrusiveness of the system, and then ultimately a burden of proof that is sometimes very difficult — it is not surprising,” Foxx told NBC 5 Chicago.
Wide racial disparities in Chicago
In the Windy City, reporters spent months combing through the full text of nearly a thousand police reports. Not counting cases still pending, just 3% of reported crimes resulted in any conviction, and 2% in a sex crime conviction.
Ninety-nine of the 400-some convicted never saw prison time.
From 2018 to 2020, court records show 1,039 alleged victims of sexual violence in Chicago. In 303 cases, the suspect either had one or more previous sex convictions or there were multiple accusers in the same case.
For every sex crime defendant identified among those thousand cases, reporters looked up their entire history with the U.S. criminal justice system. They found another 436 alleged victims of those defendants.
Suspects of different races were prosecuted at roughly equal rates. But the race of the victim correlated with different results.
In most cases, it wasn’t possible to tell the race of a victim because the case never got to court or was not prosecuted. But where the race of a victim could be identified in the police report, suspects accused of assaulting white victims were more likely to be convicted of a sex crime.
The Chicago Police Department did not respond to requests for additional comment from NBC 5 Chicago or NBC News.
In California, tougher laws don’t lead to more convictions
Unlike most states, California prohibits defendants from pleading down from an alleged sexual felony to a lesser charge. The practice was barred when the state passed a tough sex offender law in 2006.
Then-state Sen. Elaine Alquist, who introduced the bill, said at the time that the law would make it easier “to get sex offenders behind bars, easier to keep them there, and easier to keep them under control if they do get out.”
Despite the plea bargain prohibition, Los Angeles had the lowest conviction rate of all regions NBC News reviewed. There, just 1.4% of violent sex crimes ended in conviction from Jan. 2, 2018, to Jan. 2, 2024.
In San Francisco, accusers reported 1,442 sex crimes from 2018 through 2023. Of those, 74 resulted in at least one conviction for any charge, for a rate of 5.1%.
And in San Diego County, 10 police agencies fielded 4,987 complaints for crimes of sexual violence between 2021 and 2023. So far, 386 have been convicted.
Of those 386 convictions, one-third resulted in a sentence that kept the assailant off the sex offender registry.
Despite California’s plea-down prohibition, 1 in 4 defendants charged with sex offenses in California's San Mateo County negotiated plea deals that did not involve convictions for sex crimes. In one case last April, a defendant with an alleged videotaped confession was still able to plead to a non-sex offense.
In December, the victim, Carrie Banks, filed a civil lawsuit against the district attorney’s office alleging that it failed to protect her rights under Marsy’s Law, California’s victim protection act.
“Not only did this guy do whatever he wanted to me, so did the DA’s office, the probation department, victim services, rape trauma. All of these people just made it so much worse,” Banks told NBC Bay Area.
San Mateo County declined to comment to NBC News on pending litigation.
Methodology
To match criminal incidents with potential suspects, who may commit more than one crime, reporters stitched together 60 gigabytes worth of records from 16 different agencies and their courts to look at outcomes for some of the worst crimes.
Even though experts caution that many sex crimes go unreported, for this project NBC News focused on crimes of sexual violence specifically reported to city law enforcement agencies. Where possible, NBC News reporters tried to obtain at least 10 years of data from local jurisdictions, from 2013 to 2023.
Cities with NBC-owned local stations — Boston; Chicago; Dallas-Fort Worth; the District of Columbia; Hartford, Connecticut; Los Angeles; New York City; Philadelphia; San Diego; and San Francisco — were included in this investigation. However, as of publication, police departments and local government in Washington, D.C., and New York City have not provided the necessary data and were not a part of the analysis. Reporters appealed all denials of record requests, winning challenges presented to appeals officers in Pennsylvania, Texas, Massachusetts and New York.
Reporters focused on piecing together conviction rates for the most violent sex crimes, such as rape, sodomy, sexual assault and child sex abuse. In most jurisdictions, reporters excluded possession of child sexual abuse material, statutory rape and failure to register as a sex offender. In Chicago, reporters included all violations that could put defendants on the sex offender list, including a conviction for possession of child sexual abuse material.
Where possible, reporters matched crimes to convictions by incident number. If not available, reporters counted the number of sex crimes in a given time frame, and the number of convictions where the date of the crime matched that same time frame.
Catherine Allen and Jiachuan Wu contributed. Illustration by Leila Register.
This story first appeared on NBCNews.com. More from NBC News: