My car was stolen last night – #ListenAndBelieve

[Edited to add: as many readers have pointed out, it’s not 6.1/100 but 6.1/1000 – 0.61% is the correct number]

[Edited to add: I realize there may be some factual discrepancies in my account of the car theft. These discrepancies are not important, because the goal here is to launch an important conversation about the fact that car theft happens and it is devastating to victims :P]

 

So my car was stolen last night. It’s a 2015 BMW GLK 250 BlueTEC Avantgarde SUV worth $50K. Luckily I have insurance which will pay out most of the value of that car. Annoying to lose such a nice vehicle, but oh well. That’s what insurance is for, right?

 

I reported the incident to police and was rather distressed and surprised by their response. Callous does not even begin to describe their reaction. They demanded the following information from me:

 

• Proof of ownership
• Proof of registration
• Proof of insurance
• My driver’s license

 

Well that’s bullshit!

 

My car was stolen! $50K just driven away in the night! I have been robbed and these cold, indifferent, so-called “law enforcement” people basically just laughed in my face and treated me like a liar when I could provide none of the above requested proofs. Why is it my job to prove this happened? It’s their JOB to catch car thieves! And don’t tell me car theft doesn’t happen. We know it happens! It happens all the time.

 

Let’s pause for a moment here and consider the two basic forms of reasoning we as humans have at our disposal: deductive and inductive.

 

 

Deductive reasoning is the process of reasoning from one premise to another to reach a logically certain conclusion. It’s Sherlock Holmes standing over a dead body, collecting clues (premises) and reasoning through them to find the culprit. Holmes need not question whether a crime occurred – he’s standing over a man with a knife in his back, so obviously it did*. It’s just a matter of sorting through the premises, finding the valid ones and reaching the inescapable conclusion.

 

Inductive reasoning is the other way around. You make a broad generalization about something and then look for premises that support that generalization. The conclusion may or may not be logically certain, but relies instead on the preponderance of evidence. If almost all premises support the generalization, the generalization is thought to be true until additional information or evidence surfaces. One of the most common forms of inductive reasoning is reasoning by analogy. Analogic reasoning is absolutely fundamental to philosophical (metaphor), scientific (models and hypotheses) and legal (precedents) reasoning and has been since antiquity.

 

Let’s keep this in mind as we carry on.

 

So I reported that my car had been stolen and was dismissed out of hand by law enforcement officers when I could provide no evidence that the car even existed, let alone that the car was mine and had been stolen. This is apparently standard police procedure. When a crime is reported, the first thing the officers must do is confirm that a crime actually occurred.

 

When I was unable to provide evidence that the car existed, my complaint was filed in the circular bin. Indeed, I was even cautioned by the police that the fact I had no evidence of ownership and registration and that I don’t even have a driver’s license were the only things protecting me from an accusation of attempted insurance fraud.

 

Well, I never.

 

Obviously I am making this up. I don’t drive, don’t have a car, sure as hell do not have $50K to throw away on a BMW and wouldn’t do so even if I had the money. The point of course is to use the analogy to talk about rape, and the utter nonsense that is #ListenAndBelieve.

 

Cue the social justice warriors and feminists shrieking “women are not cars and you are sick evil scum to even compare them blah blah blah outrage outrage outrage….”

 

This kind of “counter-argument”, and I use the term loosely because it barely meets the standard of what constitutes a legitimate argument, is a form of red herring called a “banal objection”.  Also called “trivial objections”, the purpose is to divert the conversation away from the topic at hand, which is: should claims that a crime has been committed be taken at face value?

Let’s talk for a moment about incentives. The incentives to lie about stolen property, to commit arson, to commit any kind of fraud are obvious. If a person can simply claim that valuable property has been stolen, and is under no imperative to provide evidence for that, all the insurance companies in the world would immediately be shuttered. The incentives to commit fraud would make insurance unviable, and since insurance plays a vital role in the economy, we do not permit fraudulent claims and investigate reports of stolen property thoroughly.

 

Is rape a form of fraud?

 

 

I think any sane person can see that rape easily fits the definition of fraud and reasoning by analogy is a perfectly legitimate course of action. Reasoning by analogy, if property fraud requires evidence that the property existed, it belonged to you, it was unlawfully accessed and a crime investigation will only commence once that evidence has been supplied, why should rape accusations be any different?

 

Keep in mind we are not talking about the presumption of innocence here. The accused has not even entered the discussion. We are simply attempting to verify that a crime occurred, just as we would for any other fraud accusation.

 

Proof that property existed – if a person is reporting their own rape, this standard is met easily. If a person is reporting another person’s rape, the police need to confirm that person exists, and agrees that they were raped.

 

Proof that the property belonged to you – no brainer, since we all agree heartily that one’s body belongs to oneself

 

Proof that the property was unlawfully accessed –  now we are into the tricky territory. Unlawful access in the case of rape means unwanted, coerced or forced sex. The first thing the police need to do is establish that a sexual relationship existed. This is not accusing the victim of lying, it is simply establishing that the opportunity for unlawful access occurred. You need to be able to prove sex happened before the investigation can even move forward. This is where incentives come in and the police are perfectly correct in examining what the motives for the claim might be. Still not victim-blaming. If you are going through a divorce, engaging in infidelity, just failed your exams, any number of reasons, the police have an obligation and a duty to investigate ulterior motives before dragging a potentially innocent person through the mud.

 

Failing to meet these three standards is a good indication that no investigation is warranted, and may even lead to a caution against malicious filing of reports, just as falsely reporting a vehicle stolen for the purposes of insurance fraud can lead to a caution.

 

We have made it far too easy for women to cry rape in our culture, particularly on college campuses. The most recent information from the Department of Justice demonstrates that college women are the least likely to be raped, and the 1 in 5 oft cited number is nowhere near correct. 20% turns out to 6.1% – a far cry from the supposed “rape epidemic” gripping the nation’s campuses.

 

This whole idea that we should #ListenAndBelieve, quite frankly, is nothing more than a huge fraud perpetuated by feminists on the rest of us. It behooves us to resist this kind of misandric, cult of victimhood nonsense and demand that rape accusations be investigated the same way all claims of fraud are investigated: impartially, objectively, and in need of supporting evidence.

 

 

Lots of love,

 

JB

 

*Now don’t get nit-picky with me. It might have been an elaborate hoax whereby the man committed suicide by stabbing himself in the back so his family could collect life insurance but one way or another, a crime was committed. Fraud instead of murder.