It was, apparently, a quick calculation.
Mansfield assumed they would run a background check on her, as well as on Washington. She was half correct. The officers looked at her record but not his, and sent the report to Lieutenant Michael Sauro, who headed Minneapolis’s ***-crimes unit. I recently met with Sauro, who is now retired, to discuss Mansfield’s case. He recalled seeing that she had a prostitution charge on her record. “I’m thinking, Whoa, wait a second here. How much resources am I going to spend if you’re that—how should I say—careless with your own self?” Sauro told me. “So after reading three or four paragraphs, I said, ‘To hell with this. We’re not going to spend any time on this.’ So that’s probably why I did not even waste my time running his criminal history.”
Sauro developed a hard-nosed cynicism during his years on the job. “People lie,” he reminded me several times as we sat in his living room. He then explained that when prostitutes report a rape, it’s typically just a deal gone bad; they want revenge for nonpayment. But, I countered, Mansfield’s one prostitution charge had been a dozen years earlier. “Yeah,” Sauro said, “but that lifestyle keeps dragging you back.”
Had anyone taken 20 minutes to enter Washington’s name into a criminal database, he or she would have seen that Washington was a Level 3 *** offender, considered the most violent and most likely to reoffend. Instead, Sauro “redlined” the investigation, shutting it down without assigning it to a detective. Washington was never interviewed by the police. But he did hear about the allegation, prompting him to threaten Mansfield by phone and text. “It was all day, every day,” she said.