"Only Murders In The Building": A grand finale

Hat tip to Gothamist for the grabby email subject line yesterday: “Your case is closed, don’t call here anymore.” But then the subhed is so bleak: “Most Rapes in New York City Went Unsolved in 2020.” Before you shrug, “Well: pandemic,” read the piece, because it’s…not that.

Christine described being drugged and raped by someone she met at a bar in September of 2020. She reported what had happened and provided investigators a detailed outline of everything she remembered. She said she later learned no investigator had gone to the bar to retrieve surveillance footage, though they did make her call her rapist on a recorded call where he yelled at her and called her stupid, further humiliating and traumatizing her. The case was closed without her knowledge.

The head of NYPD’s Special Victims section mealy-mouthed something about looking into that case, but the fact is, the crappy handling of Christine’s case is nothing new or unique to the pandemic; it reflects pre-existing problems NYPD didn’t deal with:

Christine’s experience echoed the testimony of many other women and family members of rape survivors who testified Monday. It also was reminiscent of long-standing issues of understaffing and poor training within the Special Victims Division, documented in a scathing report by the city’s Department of Investigation in 2018, and a subsequent investigation with the New York Times earlier this year.