The New Orleans Police Department routinely ignored sex crimes, following up on just 14 percent of reported cases over a three-year period — and in one case, a detective expressed a belief that rape should be legal.

The city’s inspector general released a report that found that of 1,290 sex crime reports that were assigned to five police detectives from 2011 to 2013, 840 of them were simply categorized as “miscellaneous” and ignored, and filed no documentation on 271 of the remaining 450 calls, according to a New York Times report.

In one instance, a detective failed to submit a rape kit for testing because of a belief that the sex was consensual. The same detective told others that he or she “did not believe that simple rape should be a crime,” according to the report.

In another case, a 2-year-old arrived in the emergency room on suspicions that the child had been sexually assault — the child even had a sexually transmitted disease — but the detective simply closed the case without following up.

Calling it a “persistent, systemic problem,” lead investigator Howard Schwartz said it was a failure of management that allowed it to happen for three years. The inspector general’s office released the findings in a joint news conference with the superintendent of police, Michael S. Harrison, who has only been at the helm for a month.

Harrison noted that he has since sent the detectives away from the special victims sections along with some of their supervisors, but declined to name any of them. He said the detectives could be charged criminally, and the department is reviewing all cases they handled. He said he was “deeply disturbed” by the allegations.

The police department routinely ignored sexual assault calls, dismissed referrals for medical help, and not processed evidence, according to the report. The detectives would even say in a report that they had delivered evidence to the state laboratory when in fact no records of it existed.