Why is the crime funnel important?

Why does this bottleneck occur?

It starts with underreporting. Why does underreporting occur? Maybe it’s how women are victim-shamed for crimes committed against them? Maybe it’s because of the systemic oppression and stigmatization of women of color? Maybe it’s because women are scared their abusers will destroy their lives?

Maybe it’s because when we do report, we’re told, “I’m sorry but we’re too busy investigating murders to deal with this right now. If we can get to it, we will.”

We know the criminal justice system is underfunded, understaffed, overwhelmed, and in serious need of reformation. This state of affairs has left a backlog of uninvestigated crimes due to “screening out” hard-to-solve crimes  -- which are often cases including sexual assault, stalking, harassment, and other non-lethal gender-based crimes -- in order to arrest and prosecute lower level crimes that are not associated with violence.

People who commit violent crimes tend to commit a lot of them -- especially gender-based crimes.

So when a woman does report her rapist or abuser to the police (which only happens about 20% of the time), she could potentially be saving dozens of other victims. Similar conclusions can be seen in intimate partner violence, stalking, harassment, and other non-lethal, “hard-to-solve” crimes.

Not to mention this failed system hurts us in other ways...

On average, there are roughly 320,000 outpatient visits and 1,200 deaths due to intimate partner violence and over $8.3Bn in spend related to medical and mental health services for domestic violence victims every year.

Garbo asks the question -- what if we could prevent the next crime from occurring? How can we use the systems already in place to overcome this bottleneck? How can we use the information already in the system to proactively prevent the next crime? These are the questions we’ve been asking ourselves as we build Garbo’s revolutionary non-FCRA background check platform.