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Notes -
I did do some digging on this in the Mattress Girl era.
The low single digit "false report" number (3-8%) is using a strict definition of false report. In this definition only police reports that have substantial evidence to show they are false are counted. It only includes reports that are wholly fabricated, e.g. someone accuses another that was not even in the same state at the time. The studies finding very low numbers exclude unsubstantiated accusations, as well as sometimes excluding partial recantations and baseless accusations. Respectively defined as cases where there is insufficient evidence to show a crime occurred, a case where the criminal aspect of the incident is recanted but material aspects of the case did occur, and cases where the reporter views the incident as assault but does not meet the legal definition of a crime. So assuming a police report was actually filed in this case, it would probably fall into the partial recantation category and would not "count" in the most strict measurements of false report.
The most extreme 3% is a lower bound on the prevalence of false police reports. It says nothing about the true number, the upper bound, or the lower bound on all accusations. Police reports making up only a fraction of total assault accusations. The "discredited" 40+% numbers you might see quoted in parts of the internet use the detectives opinion on the case. The detectives opinion does not match the strict definition of false report, so these conflicting numbers are typically excluded form meta and review papers. Those papers are (in some sense) right to say the methodology of the 40+% studies are flawed. My main objection is that they are flawed in precisely the same way as the 3% papers. You do not have a ground truth to base your estimate on. If you had some easy high certainty method of determining if a report was true or false—there wouldn't be any fear of a false accusations and there wouldn't be any fear of not being believed as a victim.
Scott did a deep dive on this topic years ago.
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