Ninety-nine of the 400-some convicted never saw prison time.
From 2018 to 2020, court records show 1,039 alleged victims of sexual violence in Chicago. In 303 cases, the suspect either had one or more previous sex convictions or there were multiple accusers in the same case.
For every sex crime defendant identified among those thousand cases, reporters looked up their entire history with the U.S. criminal justice system. They found another 436 alleged victims of those defendants.
Suspects of different races were prosecuted at roughly equal rates. But the race of the victim correlated with different results.
In most cases, it wasn’t possible to tell the race of a victim because the case never got to court or was not prosecuted. But where the race of a victim could be identified in the police report, suspects accused of assaulting white victims were more likely to be convicted of a sex crime.
The Chicago Police Department did not respond to requests for additional comment from NBC 5 Chicago or NBC News.
In California, tougher laws don’t lead to more convictions
Unlike most states, California prohibits defendants from pleading down from an alleged sexual felony to a lesser charge. The practice was barred when the state passed a tough sex offender law in 2006.
Then-state Sen. Elaine Alquist, who introduced the bill, said at the time that the law would make it easier “to get sex offenders behind bars, easier to keep them there, and easier to keep them under control if they do get out.”
Despite the plea bargain prohibition, Los Angeles had the lowest conviction rate of all regions NBC News reviewed. There, just 1.4% of violent sex crimes ended in conviction from Jan. 2, 2018, to Jan. 2, 2024.
In San Francisco, accusers reported 1,442 sex crimes from 2018 through 2023. Of those, 74 resulted in at least one conviction for any charge, for a rate of 5.1%.
And in San Diego County, 10 police agencies fielded 4,987 complaints for crimes of sexual violence between 2021 and 2023. So far, 386 have been convicted.
Of those 386 convictions, one-third resulted in a sentence that kept the assailant off the sex offender registry.
Despite California’s plea-down prohibition, 1 in 4 defendants charged with sex offenses in California’s San Mateo County negotiated plea deals that did not involve convictions for sex crimes. In one case last April, a defendant with an alleged videotaped confession was still able to plead to a non-sex offense.
In December, the victim, Carrie Banks, filed a civil lawsuit against the district attorney’s office alleging that it failed to protect her rights under Marsy’s Law, California’s victim protection act.
“Not only did this guy do whatever he wanted to me, so did the DA’s office, the probation department, victim services, rape trauma. All of these people just made it so much worse,” Banks told NBC Bay Area.
San Mateo County declined to comment to NBC News on pending litigation.
Methodology
To match criminal incidents with potential suspects, who may commit more than one crime, reporters stitched together 60 gigabytes worth of records from 16 different agencies and their courts to look at outcomes for some of the worst crimes.
Even though experts caution that many sex crimes go unreported, for this project NBC News focused on crimes of sexual violence specifically reported to city law enforcement agencies. Where possible, NBC News reporters tried to obtain at least 10 years of data from local jurisdictions, from 2013 to 2023.
Cities with NBC-owned local stations — Boston; Chicago; Dallas-Fort Worth; the District of Columbia; Hartford, Connecticut; Los Angeles; New York City; Philadelphia; San Diego; and San Francisco — were included in this investigation. However, as of publication, police departments and local government in Washington, D.C., and New York City have not provided the necessary data and were not a part of the analysis. Reporters appealed all denials of record requests, winning challenges presented to appeals officers in Pennsylvania, Texas, Massachusetts and New York.
Reporters focused on piecing together conviction rates for the most violent sex crimes, such as rape, sodomy, sexual assault and child sex abuse. In most jurisdictions, reporters excluded possession of child sexual abuse material, statutory rape and failure to register as a sex offender. In Chicago, reporters included all violations that could put defendants on the sex offender list, including a conviction for possession of child sexual abuse material.
Where possible, reporters matched crimes to convictions by incident number. If not available, reporters counted the number of sex crimes in a given time frame, and the number of convictions where the date of the crime matched that same time frame.
Catherine Allen and Jiachuan Wu contributed. Illustration by Leila Register.