In Lawrence, the way rape is investigated (or not) is absolutely criminal

Police and prosecutors in Lawrence have a staggering amount to learn about sexual assault.

In theory, investigating such reports is part of their job. But do they even know what rape is?

Angela Garza told The Star that when she reported to Lawrence police that her ex-boyfriend had raped her multiple times while they were still together in 2016, the officer who took her report told her that “since it was a relationship, it means it was consensual.”

No, it doesn’t. Laws on spousal rape began to change in the ‘70s. By 1993, marital rape was illegal in every state in the country.

One University of Kansas student who reported being raped said a Lawrence police officer told her that sexual assaults happen when women in college “experiment.” Police finally contacted her alleged assailant — seven months later.

It’s bad enough that even multiple reports against the same man don’t necessarily result in an arrest in this major college town, where a KU guest lecturer accused of three sexual assaults was never charged.

But given the epic failures of this department and of the Douglas County District Attorney’s Office on this front, maybe those women who say they were given the very latest in advice from the 1800s should be glad they weren’t arrested, like the KU law student who was wrongly charged with filing a false rape report.

And how are they ever going to do better when they don’t acknowledge any problem?

“The Lawrence Police Department takes alleged crimes of a sexual nature very seriously,” spokesperson Amy Rhoads wrote in an email. The department, she wrote, “is firmly committed to assisting the survivors of sexual assault.”

Douglas County District Attorney Charles Branson at least seems prepared, however belatedly and grudgingly, to acknowledge that change is in order.

But then, Branson charged at least three women with filing a false rape report in just the last two years. And he only dropped two of those cases recently, after The Star asked about them.

No wonder KU law professor Suzanne Valdez has concluded that “Women aren’t safe here. Police aren’t protecting women, the DA’s not protecting women.”

How tragic — criminal, really — that she feels a responsibility to tell women to report, but not to “expect anyone to believe you because that’s not what’s going to happen.”

Branson told The Star that it’s important to prosecute false rape reports because when “we find instances of cases where we believe that somebody has made a false report that could have horrendous consequences to another party, we have to take those things very seriously.”

Wrongful convictions in rape cases almost never come from false reporting, but from inaccurate identifications in attacks by strangers. And of course, there are relatively few such cases.

Branson still seems more interested in pursuing mythical false rape reports than real rapes.

“Regret’s a big issue for juries” in rape cases, he told The Star. “They’re going, ‘Well, you know, maybe she’s upset now that this has occurred, but it was OK at the time.’ And so those are really hard concepts for juries to sort out and figure out. Juries don’t like these cases.”

It’s his job to help juries figure out hard concepts. But first, he’d to understand those concepts himself, and it’s still not clear that he does.