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Sometimes crime doesn’t pay, but at the same time it doesn’t get solved either. From the Los Angeles Times‘ L.A. County Sheriff’s Department suspends DNA testing in sexual assault cases:
Out of cash and understaffed, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has suspended its faltering effort to analyze DNA evidence from thousands of rape and sexual assault cases.The department halted shipments of the genetic evidence to private crime laboratories at the end of May after funds allotted for the testing ran dry, according to a report submitted by Sheriff Lee Baca to the county Board of Supervisors late last week.
Sheriff’s Department officials said they expected to receive federal grant money next month, and more funds in the fall, that would allow them to continue testing for four or five months. After that, however, the department will have to rely on an uncertain stream of state funding, officials said.
The haphazard approach underscores the trouble Baca has had delivering on a promise he made in November to clear the decades-old backlog of evidence from roughly 4,600 cases and to keep pace with testing evidence from all new cases. Late Monday afternoon, a spokesman for Baca said that Marshall University in West Virginia had agreed to do a small amount of testing for free each month, adding to the sense that the Sheriff’s Department is scrambling to find help anywhere it can…
Does that mean that if you’re male, then you’re likely to have more police resources applied to any violent crime perpetrated against you in Los Angeles County than if you happened to be female? I’m guessing this is the unitended, secondary message of this bit of news from Southern California.
Seriously, if you believe that one of the major functions of government to deterring violent crime — deterring violent crime by enforcing criminal laws and jailing violent criminals — then Los Angeles County probably isn’t your kind of local government. Especially if you’re female.
Just incredible news coming out of Southern California, to say the least.
3 Comments
Lets stop fingerprinting insteadgenetic testing is the only way to keep up an ACCURATE rate of convictions,
WTF?Doen’t this qualify for federal subsistence funding under VAWA?
The more I hear about LA, the less I EVER want to live there. Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ, what a clusterfuck.
“Real” EqualityIf we’re truly talking about Federal Equality, then we need to find language that includes women in a way so they will receive the SAME treatment WHITE HET MEN would receive if they were being raped as often as women, transgender people, and gay men.