While presenting crime statistics on Tuesday, Wichita Police Chief Gordon Ramsey made a rather troubling statement about women’s culpability in their own sexual assaults.

He reported that more teens and adults were raped in 2019 than in 2018. As difficult as that is to hear, it was far from the most shocking thing Ramsey said.

In an effort to try and account for the increase in rape, Wichita Police Chief Gordon Ramsay seemed to blame the victims of these abhorrent crimes.

“Too often, we have women that are meeting men that they do not know — going to their homes or meeting them out — and the result is a sexual assault,” Ramsey said. “We have been trying to educate the public on the connection between the social media platforms, the hook-up platforms that are driving these numbers, so that people know that these are dangerous and that their safety is important to us, and that in many of these cases, they are preventable by using good judgment.”

It’s deeply problematic to hear the head of the largest police force in the state make a statement seemingly blaming victims.

Consequently, Ramsay was compelled to apologize through his Facebook page. In this apology, he said that he appreciates criticism of all kinds, and was merely misunderstood in his prior statement. He wrote that the survivors of sexual assault are never to blame for the crimes committed against them, and that he wants to do everything in his power to address the issue of sexual assault.

This is a sound apology, and I respect the effort Ramsey put into it, but I still want to know what “everything in his power” means. It sounds good to make sweeping, generalized statements like that, but I’d like to know specifically what he plans to do to combat this rise in violent sexual crime.

Others are prepared to take steps to prevent sexual assaults. The Match Group, which owns Tinder, along with many other dating platforms, announced that they are partnering with Noonlight to roll out several new safety features for many of their apps.

This sounds proactive and forward thinking, but the move came after an investigative report by Propublica and Columbia Journalism Investigations from December 2019 detailing how Match Group didn’t have a policy in place of running background checks on its dating app users — essentially throwing vulnerable people to the wolves.

Match Group initially came out after the report saying they didn’t collect enough personal data on their users for background checks to be feasible, but the announcement of their partnership with Noonlight came just a month later. Since people should actually be safer, I’ll happily take it.

My point is that there was a rapid response from Match Group to the negative press, resulting in a plan with reasonable implementation.

It is my hope that Wichitans can get a similar response from their chief of police on how his department plans to reverse this shocking crime trend without blaming victims.