Monthly Check-in January-June 2021
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Turnover has been beneficial; people are on board for the project
Birmingham investigator who's full time on the grant and he takes care of all the Birmingham cases. DA office employee, but he has full access.
Angelo said only partially tested kits would be prior to this specific date (est 2007). Anything after it won't be partially tested. With Fy20 will do another inventory of all kits since 2016 inventory, so will have another batch of unsubmitted kits. Most are already being tested (Birmingham has been sending ~10 a month on top of SAKI cases).
Need to do subaward monitoring, monitoring lab. Angelo working well with Aryn. Lab has several federal grants so familiar with monitoring.
Fy16 grant on track to close out September.
All court systems are STILL shut down. Behind by over a year for cases. Most cases will go straight to the grand jury because they're cold cases.
Laboratory continues to function throughout COVID. Grant is paying for submitting kits now, so lab is more open to testing!
Any funding release issues with FY20 grant? Haven't gotten special withholding released yet, but still working on it. Purpose area 1 to do another inventory. Lab is going to complete NEPA checklist.
Inventory certification form
Partially Tested Kit Inventory:
- NEPA is complete, special withholding condition released
- Working on inventory for partially tested kits. Asking departments within Jefferson County to collect data on their partially tested kits. Goal is to avoid going into evidence rooms this time (like they did originally). Kits would be back at the police departments (not at lab).
- Expect to wrap this up within the next 3 months. If expected to go longer, BJA would like a written plan for how you intend to complete the inventory.
ViCAP Challenges:
Yes, challenges with VICAP is that they are all Birmingham cases. Site coordinator has VICAP entry privileges, but needs Birmingham to approve cases from within the system. SAKI investigators are working Birmingham's cases. Jurisdictions in JC outside Birmingham haven't wanted help (don't have capacity issues like Birmingham).?
Serial Offenders:
Have you identified serial offenders through SAKI case investigations? Yes
If yes, please summarize efforts made and/or provide success stories. Some things we’re interested in:
Is there any detailed data about these offenders in the sense of are they committing other crimes besides sexual assault; Yes, we're also seeing this. Tracking them based on criminal history. Most common is sexual assault with homicide/attempted homicide, robbery, burglary, and assault/DV. Could get these data if you wanted to pull it. Easily could do this on the serial offenders.
how many serial assault serial offenders have you identified via testing SAKI cases; 50 CODIS hits so far, at least (slightly above national average based on number of kits tested).
is there data on how many cases an offender may be linked to; yes, we have these data and are tracking it (for example, 15 victims from one offender, and another offender had 7, another offender had 4). Asked for help from FBI. Another one with 9 hits across multiple states.
is this serial offending data an unexpected result for you? No, because I've seen this happen in the community (repeat offenders). Victims coming in with similar backgrounds, looked the same, we knew we had serial offenders working in the area. Law enforcement and prosecutors were really surprised by serial data. Our investigators are training other investigators about how often this happens and believing victims. Birmingham is having staffing issues to invest in this. Our SAKI investigators are helping with cold cases, and our crime analysts are reviewing data as well. Birmingham has 100+cases per detective, all sex crimes and DV and juvenile cases are grouped together in that unit. SAKI investigators are 100% investigating Birmingham cases. The investigators are excellent, trauma-informed and skilled interviewers.
Brief check in for any needs. Worked to schedule call for beginning of May with Carey Hendricks included. Scheduled call.
Concerns over continuing to apply for Purpose Area 1, because you can't move toward sustainability. Lab is relying on SAKI funding to test kits, and is doing so at such a slow pace that it's impossible to complete testing of kits in the grant allotment. Additionally, lab is still refusing to outsource kits or hire additional personnel.
1/3 of the way through the initial inventory. 3876 total kits.
COVID slowed everything down.
Partially tested are already in existing inventory. Currently submitted completely unsubmitted kits first. We haven't yet discussed how to test partially tested kits. We're so far away from testing those because it's taking so long to test the unsubmitted. And that goes for the other evidence as well. We don't have a plan for how to test any of that.
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