Report: Baltimore Co. Police Dismiss High Number Of Rape Reports

Baltimore County Police may be drastically under-investigating rapes, a BuzzFeed News investigative report finds.

Katie J.M. Baker, who co-wrote the report out Thursday, spoke the same morning to Bryan Nehman. She and colleague Alex Campbell looked at the data, interviewed victims and suspects, and reached out to police and legal experts. Between 2009 and 2014, 34 percent of alleged rapes in Baltimore County were declared "unfounded," according to FBI data. The national average is more than 7 percent.

"We found that detectives who are trained to handle sex crimes often never even met or spoke with alleged victims who made these reports before instructing officers to shut these cases down and that's mostly because they believed the women were not fighting back hard enough or as one police report put it, that the woman did not 'resist to the best of her ability,'" Baker said.

More