It’s time now for a fact-check of North Carolina politics. A Republican-backed ad is making this accusation against Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein, who is running for governor: “Now Stein is bragging about his work on rape kits. How dare he. On Stein’s watch, rapes in North Carolina are up 53%.” To find out if that’s true, I’m joined now by Paul Specht of WRAL.
Marshall Terry: Stein has been North Carolina's attorney general since 2017. What does the data say about rapes during his time in office?
Paul Specht: Well, there's a lot of data out there, and so the first thing we had to do was figure out which statistics the ad makers were referring to. They could have been referring to rape convictions or they could have been talking about the rape rate, which is the number of reports compared to the state's population.
In this particular case, the ad makers were referring to the sheer number of rapes reported between 2016 and 2022, which was the last year of complete data available from the SBI, the State Bureau of Investigation. What we found was that information was flawed — in part because during that window of time, law enforcement agencies from the SBI onto the FBI, they expanded their definition of rape.
The old definition, the one that was there when Stein took office, was worded in a way that it appeared to be aimed only at women victims. The new definition that was put in place between 2018 and 2019, that one is more broad. It accounts for more situations and more types of victims. Experts told us, including a spokesperson for the SBI, that that played a role in the total number of rapes going up between 2016 and 2022.
Terry: Now, the ad says "on Stein's watch." What is the attorney general's role in preventing and prosecuting crimes like rape?
Specht: They're in charge of prosecuting crimes. They're not law enforcement. They can't stop crime. Even the premise of this ad is a little misleading because the attorney general can't set new punishments for crime, or anything like that, through policy. That's up to the General Assembly. It's really a stretch to accuse him of letting rapes happen.
Terry: You've mentioned the ad makers. Who is behind this ad? And, what did they say when you reached out to them?
Specht: The people behind this ad are the Republican Governors Association and they support Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor. And they played a large role, frankly, in this state trying to get him elected. They looked at the total number of rapes reported between 2016 and 2022, the most recent year of data available from the SBI — that went up 53%. But again, that data is flawed because the definition of rape changed during Stein's tenure and it expanded the amount of cases that qualified as rapes.
What we found — the most accurate information is from the North Carolina Sentencing Commission. They track the number of people each year who have been convicted and sentenced of the most serious rape offenses from first-degree rape, second-degree rape, statutory rapes, things like that. We looked at the total numbers of all of those during Stein's tenure and found that they went up 8%. That is a far cry from the 53% claim that the RGA put in their ad.
Terry: So how did you rate this claim?
Specht: We rated this claim mostly false. It has an element of truth — in that, if you cherry-pick and look at the sheer number of rape reports without accounting for the definition change, then you get 53%. That is one way to get it. That's fair.
But better ways to get it — from looking at the rape rate, from accounting for the change in definition, from looking at convictions rather than just reports, paint a much different picture. And that's why it's mostly false.
