Advocates of due process look hopefully to Attorney General William Barr to stop law enforcement’s recent drift away from traditional protections of Western jurisprudence. The spotlight is on one particular campaign.

Start by Believing Day was observed on April 3rd—the first Wednesday of every April. Start by Believing is a Department of Justice (DOJ) funded drive to transform American police procedure so that accusations of sexual abuse are met with belief and those accused are not presumed innocent until proven guilty. The attitude of “believe the victim” has ruled campus hearings on sexual assault for decades. It is spreading to police departments. This is a logical progression as campus hearings commonly share proceedings in which an accused has received no due process with prosecutors who pursue criminal charges.

Matt Rolph dramatizes the impact on real human beings. The 22-year-old sobbed as he spoke to the New York state paper that independently investigated an accusation of rape against him. The paper and a jury found him not guilty. But the campus hearing, at which he was refused the presence of a lawyer, found him guilty. “It hurts so much that anyone can just google my name and think that I’m a monster,” Rolph declared, “because they don’t know that there was no evidence.” On course to graduate within a few months, Rolph was expelled from Hobart College due to a complaint by an accuser whose identity remains confidential. He is a broken young man.

The underlying issue in cases like Rolph’s is due process. It is jeopardized, if not destroyed, by expanding the “guilty until proven innocent” approach into police departments and courtrooms. Those who champion due process have reason for optimism, however. The recent appointment of Barr as AG has raised hopes that the DOJ will reaffirm traditional principles of justice, especially the presumption of innocence. Start by Believing is a test case.

The program is administered by End Violence Against Women International (EVAWI)–an organization supported by the DOJ’s Office on Violence Against Women. It has received over 20 DOJ grants for a total of about 9 million dollars, with the last grant of $400,000 occurring last fall. But opposition mounts. A headline in the academic watchdog The College Fix announced “Due-process group kicks off campaign to expose flaws of ‘Start by Believing’.” The due process group is Stop Abusive and Violent Environments (SAVE).

To what does SAVE object?

Start by Believing’s victim-oriented approach is embodied by campaign’s Law Enforcement Action kit, which aims at restructuring the framework of police ethics and procedure. The kit’s core is the manual “Effective Report Writing: Using the Language of Non-Consensual Sex.” It is a game-changer for police investigations and for due process. Police are admonished to believe all sexual abuse accusations and to “recreate the reality of the sexual assault from the victim’s perspective” without heed to “changing statements” about the alleged crime.

The International Association of Chiefs of Police code currently states, “The law enforcement officer shall be concerned equally in the prosecution of the wrong-doer and the defense of the innocent. He shall ascertain what constitutes evidence and shall present such evidence impartially and without malice.” And police traditionally seek both inculpatory and exculpatory evidence, including shifts in statement, which is made available to both the prosecution and defense.

Under EVAWI guidelines, however, the police become agents of the prosecutor, not independent fact finders. The manual’s stated goal for an investigation is a “successful prosecution,” which means “an effective report must be prepared by the investigator in anticipation of potential defense strategies,” and it must include “the information necessary to undermine them.”

The most effective evidence of the bias is simply to quote the manual:

• Page 5: “Record witness statements, especially those that corroborate the victim’s account.” And “document suspect statements, especially those that corroborate the victim’s account.”
• Pages 15-16: “Another crucial strategy is to always use the language of non-consensual sex when writing a sexual assault report.” And “to recreate the reality…from the victim’s perspective, ‘word pictures’ in a written report must rely on the language of non-consensual sex.”
• Page 22: “[I]investigators can elicit a detailed description…which provides clues about what the victim was experiencing. This is especially important when the description matches up with the victim’s account of events, including everything that the victim was thinking and feeling at the time.”
• Page 34: “[I]nvestigators can minimize the risk of contradiction by not writing a detailed report for any victim or witness who has already provided a detailed, written summary of events.”

In short, the manual advises police to slant the report, cast the encounter as non-consensual, emphasize subjective factors, and conceal inconsistencies—all the while considering how to counter defense strategies.

EVAWI manifests a combination of “victim-centered” and “trauma-informed” approaches which, in a 2018 Open Letter, over 150 professors and legal experts called a “virtual chicken soup of quasi-diagnoses such as…‘fragmentation of memories’.” A current petition seeks to return police investigations to fact and away from selective and biased reports.

The DOJ is changing. The Mueller report and growing calls for internal investigations may occasion more shifts away from FBI methods that arouse accusations of bias. As part of that shift, the DOJ’s funding of a project that rejects due process should be abandoned.