Posted by Michael Tomasky Monday September 15 2008 20:59 BST
The things you learn these days. So it turns out that Alaska is the forcible rape capital of the United States, by some distance in fact, with 76 instances per 100,000 inhabitants. The state-by-state list from the FBI is here [ http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2006/data/table_05.html ].
So today ABCNews.com moves a piece [ http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/Story?id=5804581 (will post as a reply to this post)] by Justin Rood reporting that the Palin administration has done very little about this. The governor did increase funding for victim assistance by 2% this year. But a larger and much more comprehensive anti-rape effort put together by the state's Department of Public Safety stalled when it reached the governor's office last summer.
Why? Because Palin famously didn't like the man who headed the department:
Days later, Palin fired [the proposal's] chief proponent, Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan, after he declined to dismiss a state trooper Palin accused of threatening her own family members. Palin has said she fired Monegan because she wanted to move his department in a "new direction," and he was not being "a team player on budgeting issues." The dismissal is now at the center of a hotly-contested investigation by the state legislature.
The status of the plan, which would have "fast-tracked" sex crime cases via a dedicated group that included specially-trained investigators, judges and prosecutors, is unknown. "I'd ask the governor," said one official with knowledge of the plan. Numerous inquiries to Palin's campaign spokeswoman went unreturned.
Seems to me that moderate women voters may be interesting in knowing about this.
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Comments
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MLB01 Sep 16 08, 1:55am
Yawn...
Name a police department head who doesn't ask for more money for this program or that. I always get a chuckle when the left tries to defend someone by stating they supported getting more money for their department. By the way, Palin's budget increased victim advocacy significantly over her predecessor.
As for Monegon, he was asked to cooperatate in finding budget efficiencies and he refused. He was rightly shown the door. Monegon even admits Palin never pressured him to fire the brother-in-law.
Mr. T has made some good points over the past weeks. This article is not one of them.
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ElBruce Sep 16 08, 5:37am
Monegan was shown the door when he went to Washington DC to try to get funds for sexual assault cases himself, instead of letting it die on Gov. Palin's desk.
When Sara Palin became mayor of Wasilla, she fired the police chief as one of her first official acts. The man she replaced him with removed from the budget having the city pay for "rape kits" (DNA evidence gathering and storage) for sexual assault victims. She signed the new budget. In fact, Wasilla was the last town in Alaska still forcing rape victims to pay for their own evidence collection, and Palin's hand-picked police chief publicly complained about the requirement when it became state law.
Why might Palin be against rape kits? Well, for one thing, they include offering the victim a "morning after" pill. Palin is on record as holding that life begins at conception and being against abortion even in cases of rape and incest.
The same requirement became Federal law when the Violence Against women act passed in 1994.
There are two final punchlines to this whole story:
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