Colleague pressures police to drop charges after false rape report involving racial stereotype

4.2.12 WC: 191694 My colleague insisted that the young man had a moral obligation to his fiancé and a legal obligation to the police to be truthful. At first, the young man refused, but my colleague, after conferring with me, told him he really had no choice, because she would be obligated to report his continuing crime of making a false report—a crime that endangered the life and liberty of anyone fitting the made-up description of the black man with the shark’s tooth. (The young man didn’t want to get the man with whom he had consensual sex in trouble, so he invoked the stereotype of the “black man” rapist.) My colleague told him that she would try to make a deal with the police under which he wouldn’t be charged with a crime in exchange for telling the truth. The young man then told the police and his fiancé the truth. The police called off the all points bulletin, and my colleague persuaded the police not to press charges against the young man. I do not know how the engagement worked out, but I do know that I learned a great deal from this experience about the complexities of sexual encounters and the need to subject claims of rape to the usual probing of the adversarial process. 250 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017337