Excerpt from CNN.com
The report is full of harrowing details alleging that five New Orleans Police Department detectives in the special victims unit may have failed to investigate sex crimes over a three-year period.
But one case stands out.
According to the seven-page document released Wednesday by the city’s Office of Inspector General, a 2-year-old was brought to a hospital emergency room after an alleged sexual assault. Tests would show the toddler had a sexually transmitted disease, the report said.
The detective in the case, who worked in the child abuse unit, wrote in his report that the 2-year-old “did not disclose any information that would warrant a criminal investigation and closed the case,” the inspector general’s report said.
“These people should have known… the right way to do things,” Quatrevaux said.
The NOPD’s Public Integrity Bureau identified 1,290 sex crime-related calls assigned to the five detectives and determined that in only 179 instances — 13.9% — did the detectives file “supplemental reports documenting any additional investigative efforts beyond the initial report; these 179 supplemental reports were the total written investigative product of the five detectives for sex crime-related calls for service for three years.”
The findings leave Quatrevaux wondering “how many potential sexual assault victims are out there without justice.” He further called on the Public Integrity Bureau to launch investigations into police misconduct.
The inspector general told CNN he’d never seen anything like this, “not in terms of the volume, the wholesale nature of it.”
“There’s so many cases where the documentation suggests nothing was done,” Quatrevaux said. “We don’t know that for a fact, but we’re missing the documentation. That’s what we need to have because the documentation is the evidence of investigative effort, and if it’s not there, then obviously we’re going to think it doesn’t exist.”
Read the entire article here.
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This child showed physical signs of assault. How many 2 year olds have the words to describe what happened to them? This is a travesty. The officers should have been trained to be in the SVU unit. Many localities now have child advocacy centers staffed with professionals equipped to handle these kinds of cases. Hopefully publishing the report initiated change.