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The defense attorney was reluctant to disagree.
How could such high crime numbers be reconciled with community feeling and experience that Traverse City was a safe place? The answer lay in the distinction between reported and documented crimes.
An analysis of the sixty-eight events conducted during the discovery phase of the case showed that most of the reported rapes were false reports. Others involved incest or consensual statutory rape. A few involved date rape. Of the sixty-eight reported events, there were no cases of forcible rape by an unrelated intruder. The plaintiff's claim of high risk was proven invalid, and the case was settled before trial.
For privacy reasons, most criminal sexual conduct files are not public records and cannot be viewed by an expert witness conducting research. In the Traverse City matter, the defense expert prepared a simple chart to be filled out by representatives of the relevant police agencies. The completed form, presented during the case's discovery phase, recapped and categorized the statistical events without compromising the identities of the victims.
Another example of the plaintiff painting a misleading picture with questionable statistics also occurred in a Michigan case, Cohen v. Whethersfield Apartments. In that case the plaintiff was attacked in her apartment by an intruder, whom she successfully drove off. At trial, the plaintiff's expert elected not to bring crime statistics into the picture since the community where the assault occurred was well known as a relatively crime-free, upper-class area. Instead, he presented the premise that although the community as a whole was low risk, almost all the crime in the city would most likely occur along a main thoroughfare connecting two higher-crime cities-Detroit and Pontiac-about twenty-five miles apart. The apartment building was situated on this thoroughfare
Before the trial, the defense expert obtained statistics for the apartment complex from a computer printout provided by local police and compared it with the statistics for the city as a whole. On a per capita basis, the risk to residents of this apartment complex proved to be less than half the risk to residents in the overall community. In fact, using the risk factor method of statistical presentation, this apartment's residents were twice as safe as typical residents of the city, who all parties agreed suffered little risk. Thus, the- plaintiff's theory was proved to be specious.
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