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Violence Against Women and Police Accountability at SRPD

Date: January 1, 2001
To: Santa Rosa Mayor, City Council, and Community
From: Women's Justice Center

Re: Violence Against Women and Police Accountability
at SRPD

On August 24th, 2,000, we wrote to then Mayor Janet Condron and the Santa Rosa City Council outlining seven victim case complaints against Santa Rosa Police for their mishandling of rape and domestic violence. These case complaints originated between May and August, 2,000. In that letter we provided an array of leads to witnesses and physical evidence supporting those complaints. We also described the police defensiveness and cover-ups we had experienced over the last year and a half as we attempted to bring a steady flow of such victim complaints to the attention of SRPD officials.

Because of our strong dissatisfaction with police response to our previous case complaints, our August 24th letter urgently requested that Santa Rosa City Council provide for independent review of the seven more recent case complaints.

In the four months since our August 24th letter and request for independent review:

• Mayor Condron and the Santa Rosa City Council denied our request for independent review of the seven case complaints,
• Instead Mayor Condron and the City Council asked the Police Chief to convene a series of meetings with the YWCA, United Against Sexual Assault, Redwood Children's Center, representatives of Santa Rosa City Council and our organization, Women's Justice Center,
• In the course of those three meetings, Santa Rosa Police presented a written report of their investigations into the seven case complaints. At no point were these SRPD findings questioned or reviewed by the group, nor at any point did any of the participants seek to inspect any of the plentiful evidence leads we provided pertaining to these complaints.
• The one substantive outcome of these meetings was a plan for SRPD chief Dunbaugh to convene two working groups; one to focus on language translation, and the other to focus on internal quality control at SRPD. Though this is a beginning, it is grossly insufficient to resolve a problem which calls for much broader and deeper digging. It also doesn't begin to resolve the monumental problem that if Santa Rosa Police say that the sun rises in the West, then Santa Rosa City Council, without further ado, seems satisfied to set the public's course based on the fact that the sun rises in the West.
• Most troublesome, in the four months since our August 24th letter, we have received eight new complaints from victims of rape and domestic violence regarding SRPD response to the victims' calls for help.

We strongly believe that the SRPD problems with handling of violence against women as well as the problem of exodus of female officers (10 since July 1996) cannot be resolved until there is willingness to look squarely at the problem. The report presented by police on the case complaints illustrates as well as anything why it is foolhardy for the community to rely on self-investigation by police for any assessment of the problems. And why it is cruel and unjust to shunt victims' complaints back into the hands of the same police that denied them justice in the first place.

The following is a critique of just one case example from the police report.. We choose the section of their report dealing with case #2 because it is the shortest and can most quickly be responded to in full. But the police biases, cover-up, and deceptions illustrated in this example permeate the police report throughout.

The SRPD report of their investigation into the detective's handling of Case #2 reads in its entirety:

"The detective assigned to the case attempted to contact the victim by telephone on the date that it was assigned (one day after the initial report). There was no answer. The detective contacted the victim approximately one week later. At that time, the victim declined to participate in an interview at the Redwood Children's Center. She did agree to speak with the detective on the telephone and a brief interview took place. The victim told the detective that she was no longer seeing the suspect and that she did not know where the suspect lived. Further investigation ultimately led to the detective identifying the suspect, interviewing him and obtaining an arrest warrant. The suspect was arrested and on September 26, 2,000, plead guilty to several counts of unlawful sexual intercourse."

Anyone reading this report would be assured that nothing was amiss in the detective's handling of the case. If anything, the report engenders a certain sympathy for the detective who had to deal with a victim who was apparently less than cooperative and who didn't know much. Yet the reality is, as you'll quickly see, that the Santa Rosa Police detective was dumping a serious case of child molestation, a case that had ample, easy to obtain evidence, and a victim who was completely cooperative. And the detective continued dumping the case even after we complained to police superiors and after we had written the August open letter to the City Council.

Look again at this report section by section:

"The detective contacted the victim approximately one week later. At that time, the victim declined to participate in an interview at the Redwood Children's Center."

1. Assuming this statement is true, the report neglects to mention that "the victim" here is a child under 14 years of age and as such, there was no way that "the victim" was capable of evaluating the significance of an interview at the Redwood Children's Center. And there is no way that a detective serious about doing the case would have left that decision to a child. The fact is that at every point in the process, this girl openly and cooperatively answered questions from all officials. But the statement in the above police report, without mention of the girl's age, leads the reader to form an opinion of an uncooperative victim of unknown age.
2. The statement (and the rest of the report) neglects to mention that the detective did not, as should have been done, contact the victim's mother to set up the interview at Redwood Children's Center, even though the victim and her mother had the same phone number and the same residence since the initial report, and were available at that same phone number on a daily basis. In fact, the detective never contacted the victim's mother until more than six weeks after the initial report, and then only after complaints had been made.
3. Perhaps most significant, police wrote the above statement even though, according to the mother and the victim, neither of them were contacted by the police during the investigation into the detective's handling of the case. This then is not, as it was put out to be, a report of an investigation, it's a public relations piece spun from the report of the detective who was supposedly being investigated. No impartial or sincere investigator would have neglected to call the victim and her mother for their version of events.

"The victim told the detective she was no longer seeing the suspect..."

1. That the victim was no longer seeing the suspect gives the reader the impression that there was no big deal here, no urgency, since the criminal activity had stopped. But the fact that a crime is no longer occurring should, of course, have nothing to do with whether or not the crime is investigated. Would you want multiple felony sex crimes against your child ignored just because the crimes had stopped? This mother certainly didn't, and she and her whole family suffered immeasurably, as we'll explain, because the case was being dumped.

The statement also implies that the child was in control of what this man was doing to her.

"...and that she (the victim) did not know where the suspect lived."

1. The victim DID know where the suspect lived, she always knew where the suspect lived, and when we were finally able to apply enough pressure to get the case moving (three months after the initial report), the detective immediately knew how to get that information from the girl.

The detective simply got in a car, picked up the girl and her mother at their home, and said to the girl, `show me where the man lives'. It is true that the girl didn't know the number address and the street name, just like most kids can't give a number address and street name of even their best friends. But the girl ALWAYS knew where the man lived and the detective could have found out from the girl where the man lived at any time, the same way every detective knows how to get an address from a child when they want it.

The truth is the detective was dumping the case, and the public needs to know that this is what it looks like when detectives dump cases. The detective buries the case under these little slights of hand. The detective's supervisor sees that the detective has come up with a `workable defense' for not moving on the case, and work on the case is stopped.

"Further investigation ultimately led to the detective identifying the suspect, interviewing him and obtaining an arrest warrant. "

1. What's left out of this statement is all the pressure that had to be applied from the outside to make each one of these things happen. Also left out is the intolerable time span it took to do them. Even after the detective had gotten the victim to show where the man lived, even after we had complained all the way up the police department ranks, even after we had made a public written complaint to the City Council and the press, the case investigation was again dead in the water.

To get things moving again we had to take the additional step of going to a deputy DA who cares about these cases and ask him to add his weight to the effort.

"The suspect was arrested..."

The suspect was arrested on September 9th. An impartial investigator would never have left out this fact, nor would they have left out that this was a solid five months after the mother, the girl, and their doctor made the initial report to Santa Rosa Police Department in early April, 2,000. The report also neglects to mention that the evidence needed for the case could have been gathered in a matter of days.

"...and on September 26, 2,000, plead guilty to several counts of unlawful sexual intercourse."

The man was charged with 24 felony counts of child sexual abuse; 12 felony counts of PC 288 (child molestation) and 12 felony counts of 261.5 (unlawful sexual intercourse). The statement also neglects to mention that the man pled to and was convicted of 6 felony counts of 261.5 waiving even his right to a preliminary hearing. An impartial investigator would never have referred to this information as "several counts..."

Most of the facts we've presented here can be verified by a check of documents on the public record.

The public needs to know a couple of other things that were left out of the police report. The mother of the girl is a Spanish-speaking single mother of three children who worked two jobs to sustain herself and her children. The detective is Spanish-speaking too. Knowing this, the public can begin to understand that the case wasn't being dumped because of any technical difficulty with language, though that would be no excuse either. Most likely the case was being dumped, like so many other cases we see, simply because officials figured the victim and her family wouldn't be able to find any effective way to complain. Once knowing the range of dynamics in an array of these cases being dumped by police, the public can then begin to ask critical questions about what kinds of system controls are necessary to protect all people's rights to police services. But first we must have honest, independent, and impartial descriptions of the problem.

Probably the most poignant thing left out of the report on this case is the tormenting consequences to the family resulting from police denial of help. In early April, when the mother never received the follow-up phone call from police that was promised by the responding officer, she had no idea where to turn. She went to the school principle for help for her daughter, and found no help there. She then began to call another police jurisdiction. Because the officers who answered the phone at the second jurisdiction didn't speak Spanish, the mother had to put her 10 year old son on the phone to try to explain the complex problem about the girl to police. The mother made five such calls to Windsor Police. Windsor Police never came to the mother's residence, nor to her assistance, though it's difficult to know exactly what information the boy communicated to police. Nonetheless, it wasn't until over two months after the initial report that the mother found her way to a social worker who then referred the mother to us.

In the meantime, however, the mother's landlord, who regularly obtained public records of police calls originated from his housing complex, noted the five calls made to police from the mother's address. Those five calls made by the mother to Windsor Police became the sole basis for the landlord writing a "notice of cause" against the mother, the first step in the eviction process.

This is the kind of snowballing of critical life problems that overtake victims when police deny services. It is something we see on a daily basis, because police denial of protection and justice is so common, especially in the minority communities we serve

The regular denial of protection, combined with police's incurable cover-ups of complaints is a deadly mix for the women and children of Santa Rosa.

We again urge you to provide an effective mechanism of independent review of police where the people can take their complaints.

Sincerely,

Marie De Santis
Director