IrisVersicolor · Yesterday 20:44
As I quoted in my above post above, the study found certain patterns - that the age bracket of 16-25 year olds were more likely to have cases designated false, unemployed were more likely than employed people, a case involving drugs or alcohol or people with mental health problems including learning disabilities more likely to be designated false.
That doesn’t actually mean the police were wrong. It could be prejudice blinding them to the truth or it could reflect reality in that certain groups are more likely to make false accusations.
Once the cases that did not meet the HO criteria for designating a case false were weeded out, the 8% police figure dropped to 3%. In other words the police tended to overestimate the number of false reports.
Again, we are just evaluating which reports we believe and which we don’t based on no real knowledge of the truth about the allegations.
Claiming I use police data to determine false claims is incorrect and misses the point. Police and CPS data are simply a factor in any discussion of false claims that have been reported. There all kinds of problems with police data, too many to go into here - that is a topic in itself.
We are still just in the business of making calculated guesses about the reliability of the police’s judgement about who is and isn’t making false accusations.
We still have no real idea how many false accusations there are, how many convictions are sound and how many acquittals allow a rapist to walk free and how many cases don't go anywhere for lack of evidence about a crime which really did take place.
We simply don’t have the ability to determine who is being truthful and who not with absolute certainty except with a minority of cases where there is cast iron evidence which allows for no debate, such as the man accused was in another town/country at the time of the alleged attack. Those are rare, especially when it comes to crimes which take place behind doors and where there aren’t witnesses except the two people involved. Mainly we're just dealing with probabilities.