May 25, 2005 News & Views » Citizen Servatius

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Who cares about rape victims? 

Money's available for testing, but it's tagged for Bob Johnson

Let me get this straight. There's enough money in the Charlotte city budget to pay for 60 additional officers to work arena events free of charge to billionaire Bobcats owner Bob Johnson. But there's not enough money to test DNA evidence that could bring rapists to justice? What exactly is the intrinsic message here? Rape is OK as long as it doesn't take place in an uptown parking lot after an arena event? Last week, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department learned it won't be getting the $428,000 federal grant it planned to use to launch a cold-case squad dedicated to solving old rape cases. This will likely force it to postpone the creation of the squad. And that will likely mean that evidence which could lock up a serial rapist will just have to gather dust down in the police property control department for a few years longer.

It's at times like this that our old friend Willie Cooper Jr. comes to mind. I like to drag Cooper out of my bag of tricks on these occasions because his story has a way of bringing everything so neatly into focus.

In 1998, two young women were brutally raped two months apart in Mecklenburg County. For six years, while city officials yapped about the arena and arts funding, the women's rape kits, which contained Cooper's DNA, sat untested in police property control.

By 2000, after another woman was attacked, investigators had collected Willie Cooper Jr.'s DNA. Yet it would be four more years before those kits were tested and Cooper was arrested, four years in which Cooper and others like him may have brutalized other women whose rape kits still remain in property control. The testing on the kits that brought Cooper to justice was paid for by another federal grant. When the grant money stops, in many cases, so does the testing. Potentially hundreds more case files dating back as far as 25 years that may contain testable DNA continue to gather dust. At this point, the police don't even know how many of the old cases need DNA analysis, and they don't have the resources to dig through the mountain of cases to locate them. That was what the rape squad was supposed to do.

While these questions remain unanswered, Charlotte could literally have had three, four, five serial rapists at work in the area at any time in the last two decades and the police wouldn't know it.

"Nobody knows," Jane Burton, the head of the microanalysis section of the department's crime lab, told us last year.

City officials would tell you we're fortunate to have a crime lab at all, that getting the grant would have put us at the forefront nationally among cities testing old rape case evidence against the DNA samples of convicted felons contained in a growing national database. They'd also remind you that they've dedicated resources to a cold case homicide squad.

That's no excuse. Although some folks appear to have forgotten, protecting citizens is supposed to be a primary function of government. We have the technology to test these kits. The fact that justice for rape victims depends on whether or not a grant comes through, while everything else under the sun gets funded, shows how twisted our priorities have become.

City leaders would like you to believe they're too broke to pay for something like this, but the truth is that it's not a priority for them. Last year, Charlotte doled out more than $300,000 to multi-million-dollar companies threatening to locate elsewhere if the city didn't give them wads of cash.

Charlotte cut back funding for the crime lab by $60,000 between 2003 and 2004, the period during which the city threw a taxpayer-funded, $24,000 "arena ground blasting" ceremony complete with a soundstage, free drinks and hotdogs to celebrate construction of the new arena.

And then, the final insult. Of the 92 officers the city is currently planning to add, at least 20 were hired to patrol the area around the arena to keep things safe during the 120 events a year that will likely be scheduled there. Those officers will do regular police work when they're not serving billionaire Johnson.

In contrast, just one of 92 new officers would be dedicated to sorting through old rape cases. Well, he would have been. Without the grant, it's unlikely that an officer will be dedicated to the project at all.

Somehow, in a tight budget year, the city found an extra $1 million to pay for officers to direct traffic for Bob Johnson. Meanwhile, new rape cases stack up.

It wouldn't surprise me if somewhere, Willie Cooper Jr. is having a good laugh over all of this.

tara.servatius@cln.com

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