In Nome, Alaska, review of rape 'cold cases' hits a wall

[Eugene]

Source: Associated Press

In Nome, Alaska, review of rape ‘cold cases’ hits a wall

By VICTORIA MCKENZIE and WONG MAYE-E
December 21, 2019

NOME, Alaska (AP) — The two cops — the cold case detective from Virginia and the evidence technician from Alaska — had a mission. Sift through more than a decade of grim stories from this small city set between the Bering Strait and Alaska’s western tundra.

Nome’s new police chief, another Virginia transplant, asked the two to untangle whether the city’s police department had failed hundreds of people — most of them Alaska Native women — who had reported they’d been sexually assaulted.

So they spent weeks inside the police station on the edge of town, squinting at computer screens and stacks of paper. What they found horrified them.

Again and again, the files showed, officers had failed to investigate rapes and other sexual crimes. In some cases, the two cops say, officers had never questioned the suspect.

-snip-

The two cops had uncovered evidence confirming a pattern of inaction that a local group of sexual assault survivors had been protesting for years — a law enforcement failure that the Alaska chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union recently described as “a systemic, decades-long indifference to the safety of Alaska Native women.”

-snip-

Read more: https://apnews.com/b6d9f5f6fd71d2b75e3b77ad9a5c0e76

[HuskyOffset]

1. That article was hard to read.

I had to stop & do something else a couple of times because it was enraging the amount of indifference being shown, over and over, to victims of sexual assault.

Stuff like this:

Gretchen Small, a police officer in Nome from 2004 to 2006, said she was ordered to stop a sexual assault investigation involving a white suspect and a 14-year-old Alaska Native victim because a sergeant knew the man and said he didn’t believe he would do such a thing.

“He doesn’t do girls,” the sergeant said, according to Small. “He only gets women at the bar drunk and takes them out in the tundra for sex. . . . He’s a good guy.”

That sounds like a pretty low bar to qualify as a "good guy".

[Srkdqltr]

2. Seems to me that a lot of men should be looked at.

I think that men who minimize rape are rapists themselves or would like to be.

[Skittles]

4. I agree

[mitch96]

3. I never understood, with rich people donating money

You never hear about donations to erase the backlog of rape kits... They just sit around with evidence collecting dust......
Then again it might just be the "old boy" network kicking in.... Lets just suppress evidence and move along ;^(
m