Did a victim of a robbery decide, after being questioned by police from that department, that it was safer to retract the report than to continue to be aggressively questioned by the police department of a university that wants to have good statistics?
Those are pictures of the first part of the "Safety Announcements" page of the website for the University of Virginia's police department.
These are also pictures of noncontiguous parts of that page, describing two sexual assaults that happened on the same day, fewer than three weeks ago:
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"Fondling"?
"OTHER"?
What about "assault" and "breaking and entering and assault"?!
This is the University of Virginia Police Department's idea of "rais(ing) awareness of how to seek prompt assistance should a crime occur"? Does that police department think that saying something like "Don't tell us if someone robs you or rapes you because we'll threaten you and/or minimize what happened" would be too honest?
It's not really assault when someone pushes you and holds you down so that he can touch you sexually, while his two, male friends watch and you and your female friend have to fight him off? It's "fondling"?
It's not really assault when someone breaks into your house and your bedroom and gets into your bed and starts kissing you? That's "other"?
What happens when you write "fondling" and "other" in the section called "report type"? Do those titles not read to a database as "assault" or "sexual assault"?
This is the address for that page:
Copyright, with noted exceptions, L. Kochman, November 3, 2016 @ 8:09 p.m.
