Dennis Wagner’s story today details the bureaucratic confusion and lack of federal oversight that allows so many crimes, rape prominent among them, to go without punishment.

Ronet Bachman, a professor of sociology and criminal justice at the University of Delaware who analyzed Indian rape data for the DOJ two years ago, said confusion and enforcement shortcomings allow repeat offenders.

Asked if the failure is due to poor training, jurisdictional issues, a lack of resources, mismanagement, complacency or incompetence, Bachman said, “It is botched because of all those things.”

Yesterday it was a case study—done after two years of legal wrangling to get access to police files—argued with some evidence that a man who assaulted more than a dozen White Mountain Apache women was never caught.

The story today has one weird note:

Native American women suffer from violent crime at a rate 2 ½ times the national average. More than one-third are raped during their lifetimes, according to the Department of Justice, compared with a national figure of one in five.

Emphasis added. That seems an extreme statistic.

A cursory check of such numbers on the internet seems to indicate that the story is conflating sexual assaults in toto with rape specifically.

On the other hand, most rape cases go unreported, and it could be that Wagner is actually using valid justice department figures. But the numbers are so high they deserves to have been explained better.