Investigation Shows SFPD Closes Rape Cases at Half the National Rate

In 2025 only 14 percent of rape cases in San Francisco were closed, according to an ongoing investigation from the SF Standard. That’s half the national rate. While the procedures for administering and processing rape kit tests has improved greatly in San Francisco over the past decade, cuts to the special victims unit and other factors have resulted in fewer investigations into alleged rapists, leaving victims waiting as their cases sit inactive. We talk about the challenges of investigating rape cases, where the SFPD is falling short and whether  the new scrutiny could lead to reforms inside the police department.

Guests:

• Anya Schultz, investigative reporter, The SF Standard
• Dr. Janelle White – executive director of SF Women Against Rape and teacher 

This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Alexis Madrigal: Welcome to Forum. I’m Alexis Madrigal.

This is a challenging topic. We’re going to be talking about sexual assault and the grim reality that the SFPD has one of the lowest clearance rates for rape cases among California counties and similar cities in the country. Rape is a notoriously difficult crime to investigate and prosecute, but some departments, including the SFPD itself, seem to succeed far more often than the current department does.

So what’s going on?

Here to talk with us, we’ve got SF Standard Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Anya Schultz. Welcome, Anya.

Anya Schultz: Thank you for having me.

Alexis Madrigal: So let’s walk through the SFPD’s stats so people kind of know where we are. One would imagine, given Me Too, given changing cultural norms, given all these things, that a police department in San Francisco would be better at investigating these cases than they were, you know, 10 or however many years ago. But what did you find?

Anya Schultz: We found that is not true. Last year, about 14% of rape cases were cleared, which means an arrest was made or they were solved in some other way, in San Francisco, which is half the national average of 28%.

And then, in California, it’s lower than every other Bay Area county over the past five years and the lowest of any large county in California.

Alexis Madrigal: How did you get onto this story? Were you just looking at crime stats and noticing a trend?

Anya Schultz: I started reporting on violence against women in San Francisco about a year ago. I first started looking at cases of domestic violence and how police solve those cases, as well as how they’re handled in family court.

I did a story on the Special Victims Unit, which is the unit that investigates domestic violence, sex crimes, rape, and found that the unit had shrunk over the past several years. It’s shrunk by half, and it seems like investigators are having to work a similar number of cases.

And I heard from survivors who I interviewed over the course of the year, with different anecdotes about how they had reported cases of sexual assault and police were not taking them seriously or not investigating. So I wanted to know if those were just a few unlucky examples or if that’s how the police are handling these cases in general.

Alexis Madrigal: So you said the SVU had shrunk by about 50%. My understanding is that SFPD as a whole has shrunk, though, but it’s not proportional to what has happened to the force as a whole.

Anya Schultz: Right. So the SFPD has shrunk about 20% since 2019, which is pretty on par with the national decline in police forces.

But the Special Victims Unit has shrunk by about half. In 2019, there were 60 investigators — that’s what they call them — to investigate all of the city’s domestic violence, child abuse, sexual assault, and related cases.

Now there are 31, so about half.

Alexis Madrigal: I mean, one can imagine, if we were to be incredibly generous to the police department, that maybe they shifted some of this work to other places, or that people within the SVU itself were fine with these changes or thought the work was somehow being distributed in some other way.

But you were able to talk to at least one investigator, the longest-tenured detective in the SFPD, who didn’t think this was a good thing.

Anya Schultz: Right. We wrote a story about him last fall, basically about how he’s watched this unit decline over his tenure.

The SFPD formed the Special Victims Unit in 2011, around the time that, because of the TV show, many places were forming those units. At the time, they had almost twice as many investigators.

When I went to his office, he basically pointed out, “Those desks are empty. There used to be people and phone calls, and now there are just big stacks of paper files to go through.”

Alexis Madrigal: Which itself is also an issue, not just for rape cases narrowly, because they also deal with elder abuse, child abuse, and domestic violence.

Anya Schultz: Right. They have huge caseloads.

When we asked SFPD, we presented the numbers showing the decline in investigations of sexual assault cases, and they basically said that caseloads have not changed, which means there’s essentially a pile of cases that are pending and have not been assigned to investigators.

Alexis Madrigal: Just so folks know, we also reached out to SFPD. We didn’t hear back from them. We also reached out to the DA’s office, and District Attorney Brooke Jenkins was unavailable.

Let’s talk a little bit about how these investigations are supposed to work and what’s happening.

You have a few different examples in your stories, but the basic idea is that somebody goes and reports a rape or a sexual assault to the SFPD. Then what happens?

Anya Schultz: Someone will go and report a rape or sexual assault to SFPD. Victims are generally advised to go and get a rape exam at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, which is where rape exams are conducted in San Francisco.

That is a very long and intensive process.

Alexis Madrigal: I think one of your sources said four hours.

Anya Schultz: Right. I’ve read that it can take up to six hours to do such a comprehensive exam. It’s a very traumatic experience after an already traumatic experience.

The woman I reported on in the story went to the exam right after the alleged rape. She then reported it to the police. She was extremely thorough. She gave them timelines, dates, receipts, photos she took that day, and information on a camera she said might have captured the alleged assault.

Police took 12 days to assign her case to an investigator in the Special Victims Unit.

When they did, she was offered essentially one investigative tactic, called a pretext call. It’s a recorded phone call where a victim calls a suspect in the presence of police and tries to—

Alexis Madrigal: And says, “Did you rape me?”

Anya Schultz: Right. Tries to elicit a confession, which sometimes works.

But experts I talked to across the country — prosecutors and police — said that’s just one tool in the toolbox. It’s not really where you start or stop in these kinds of cases.

In her case, though, that’s essentially where they stopped.

Her rape kit came back as a DNA match to the man she had identified to police. His DNA was already in the national database.

Janelle White: Mm-hmm.

Anya Schultz: And she was told by investigators that even a DNA match was not enough.

Alexis Madrigal: When we think about the counterfactual here, Sacramento appears to have a much higher clearance rate, right? And there are a few other cities that are doing much better.

What do we know about how much more aggressively they’re investigating, or what other steps they’re taking?

Anya Schultz: Experts I spoke to said there are a lot of different ways you can corroborate a victim’s story in a case like this.

Oftentimes in a sexual assault case, the defense will argue that it was consensual. You can try to back up every single thing the victim told you about their day and determine whether they were telling the truth or lying about events leading up to the assault.

You can look at text messages, video evidence, and other corroborating information.

California law is also pretty clear that you can press charges and obtain a guilty conviction based solely on a survivor’s testimony. That’s included in the jury instructions read in pretty much every sex crimes trial.

There are a lot of different investigative steps you can take, including interviewing the suspect, which we found SFPD does not always do.

Alexis Madrigal: Huh. Just from watching television, I would’ve thought that was the first step.

Anya Schultz: Right. I think, having watched television, I would’ve thought a lot of this would be handled differently.

But in this case specifically, they did not interview the suspect or any witnesses the survivor said were present.

In other cases we spoke to, and after reviewing complaints to the Department of Police Accountability — an independent oversight body in San Francisco — we found numerous complaints from rape and sexual assault victims saying police handled their cases in similar ways.

Alexis Madrigal: I mean, one of the things that really stands out is that we’re not necessarily talking about convictions, of which there’s an even smaller number. We’re just talking about cases that were cleared.

The vast majority of these cases really end up in a kind of administrative limbo within the police department, right? They’re not being closed, they’re not being solved, but no one’s really working on them.

What is that kind of squishy middle, or ongoing investigation? What’s even happening?

Anya Schultz: In police lingo, they call it “inactive.”

Also, about 10 years ago, in 2016, the Police Commission ordered SFPD to publish reports twice a year on the status of every rape kit case. They never posted them on their website until we requested them in May, and now they’re on the website as of June.

We looked at all the numbers and put the data together and saw that the number of cases being actively investigated has dropped significantly.

The number of cases police call “inactive,” which essentially means the case is open but no one’s working on it — it’s just sitting there — has increased dramatically. Last year, 78% of rape cases in San Francisco were inactive.

Alexis Madrigal: Do we think they were actually doing a better job 10 years ago, or do we think this is just how they began coding these cases differently?

Anya Schultz: That’s a good question.

Staffing-wise, we know the numbers have decreased considerably. But the rationale for not investigating some of these cases seems to be the same over many years.

On those reports, they write reasons why cases are inactive, and one of them is that the suspect thought the sex was consensual and there was no other corroborating evidence.

That’s kind of the defense in most sexual assault cases.

Experts I talked to — prosecutors across the country — said that’s not enough. A police officer shouldn’t make that decision right there. They should look for more corroborating evidence, and then that’s something for a jury to decide.

Alexis Madrigal: We’re talking about a new SF Standard investigation finding that the San Francisco Police Department closes rape cases at about half the national average.

We’re talking with Anya Schultz, an investigative reporter at the publication.