Remember yesterday when I wrote about how the NYC Council had cut all of their sexual violence prevention and services funding? Well doesn’t it make you feel a LOT better that this is happening in a city where police sometimes downgrade violent assaults and sexual assaults to misdemeanors like criminal trespassing?

Responding to the ongoing Voice series “NYPD Tapes,” [retired NYPD Detective First Grade Harold] Hernandez reveals publicly for the first time that the downgrading of crimes to manipulate statistics allowed a man to commit six sexual assaults in a Washington Heights neighborhood in 2002 before he was finally caught after his seventh attack.

The initial six crimes, committed over a two-month period, went unnoticed by 33rd Precinct detectives, Hernandez says, because patrol supervisors had improperly labeled most of them as misdemeanors. It was only through a lucky break—an alert neighbor spotted the suspect pushing his seventh victim into her apartment—that the rapist, Daryl Thomas, was finally captured.

After his arrest, Hernandez persuaded Thomas to detail his earlier crimes. The detective then combed through stacks of crime complaint reports to identify the pattern of violence…

Hernandez learned that most of the victims’ complaints in the prior assaults had been classified as criminal trespassing, so the incidents never reached the detective squad and, in turn, were never declared a pattern, which would have triggered an intense campaign to capture the perpetrator.

Read the whole Voice article and be prepared to get very, very angry.

Via Feministing