Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen by Dan Heath

Author:Dan Heath [Heath, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
Published: 2020-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

The tendency to lessen the severity of crimes in order to dodge criticism became known as “downgrading.” Reply All included a chilling example of downgrading. Here’s the conversation between the host (PJ) and Ritchie Baez, a 14-year veteran of the NYPD (and a caution to readers: there’s a description of rape in the passage ahead):

PJ: Ritchie and his partner had been told to just stand on this one street corner all night. It’s this intersection in a commercial part of town, so it’s all these retail stores. But it’s midnight, so all the stores are closed. It’s the kind of assignment where most nights you just stand there and nothing happens until the sun comes up. But that night, this guy runs up to them and says, “Hey, something really bad is going on. You gotta help.”

RITCHIE: He says, “Listen, I see a guy dragging a lady into a vacant lot. I think he’s gonna rape her.” So we got in the car. We drive. And I hear a lady screaming, “Help, help, help.” So I see him on top of her. He’s punching her, and he’s raping her. So I flash my light. I tell him, “Stop.” He stopped. And I tell them, both of them, “Come towards me.” They both starts walking. So she has a black eye. Both have their pants down.

PJ: The victim starts to tell Ritchie what happened. And he says thinking back now, the thing that still stands out to him is just how precise she was in the way she described it.

RITCHIE: She says, “He raped me. I know I’m a prostitute, but no money was exchanged. He assaulted me, and he inserted his penis inside my vagina without my consent, while he was assaulting me.” So she basically broke down the definition of rape. Textbook.

PJ: So Ritchie calls the crime in over the radio, and his boss shows up at the scene.

RITCHIE: And basically, he tried questioning her. The way he was questioning her—they—they question the victim several times and try to see if you change your story slightly.

PJ: Ritchie knew exactly what his boss was up to. His boss did not want to enter this victim’s crime into CompStat. And so what he was doing was he was questioning her over and over and over again, trying to find some hole in her story that would give him an excuse to treat the crime as something less than rape. He was trying to downgrade her crime.

PJ: What’s the kind of change that would allow a downgrade?

RITCHIE: Well, they was trying to make it as a theft of service.

PJ: Theft of service?

RITCHIE: Yeah.

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