Jacob Alperon Sherrif at the Huffington Post, after examining Wasilla’s budget records and talking to the pre-Palin police chief, reports:
Under Sarah Palin’s administration, Wasilla cut funds that had previously paid for the medical exams and began charging victims or their health insurers the $500 to $1200 fees. Although Palin spokeswoman Maria Comella wrote USA Today earlier this week that the GOP vice presidential nominee “does not believe, nor has she ever believed, that rape victims should have to pay for an evidence-gathering test…To suggest otherwise is a deliberate misrepresentation of her commitment to supporting victims and bringing violent criminals to justice,” Palin, as mayor, fired police chief Irl Stambaugh and replaced him with Charlie Fannon, who with Palin’s knowledge, slashed the budget for the exams and began charging the city’s victims of sexual assault. The city budget documents demonstrate Palin read and signed off on the new budget. A year later, alarmed Alaska lawmakers passed legislation outlawing the practice.
It wasn’t until Sarah Palin and her hand-picked police chief were in power that the city decided that it couldn’t afford to pay for ordinary police procedure for rape victims — even while Palin was spending millions on a new sports complex.
Sherrif’s proof that Palin was aware of the change from the start is that Palin signed off on the budget. I don’t think that’s conclusive; Palin could claim that she just signed the forms, and others in government were the ones that actually knew what was going on. (We are, after all, talking about one line item in a report of over 100 pages).
But that shouldn’t get Palin off the hook.
1) Palin fired the previous police chief so she could install her close political ally Charlie Fannon in the job. Choosing the right people is a major part of being an executive; ignorance is no excuse. As Mayor, Palin was responsible for choosing good people — and if she instead chose a close ally who instituted a policy of gouging rape victims, and then defended that to the press, that’s Palin’s responsibility too.
2) Whether or not Palin knew of the policy before it was implemented, she certainly found out about it at some point. Former Alaska Governor Tony Knowles has said that when Alaska outlawed charging victims for rape exams, they were doing so in response to Wasilla’s policy:
Eight years ago, complaints about charging rape victims for medical exams in Wasilla prompted the Alaska Legislature to pass a bill — signed into law by Knowles — that banned the practice statewide.
“There was one town in Alaska that was charging victims for this, and that was Wasilla,” Knowles said.
The USA Today story gives the impression that Wasilla may not have been the “one town in Alaska” doing this, but stopping Wasilla’s gouging of rape victims was a important motivation — and maybe the primary motivation — for the Alaska legislature to take action.
It is not known how many rape victims in Wasilla were required to pay for some or all of the medical exams, but a legislative staffer who worked on the bill for Croft said it happened. “It was more than a couple of cases, and it was standard practice in Wasilla,” Peggy Wilcox said, who now works for the Alaska Public Employees Association. “If you were raped in Wasilla, this was going to happen to you.”
It’s impossible that things could have gotten as far along as the state legislature passing a statewide law to change Wasilla’s practice, without the mayor of Wasilla ever being aware of the policy. Yet in public, Palin never criticized the policy and never proposed a new policy. On the contrary, she apparently gave Fannon permission to speak to the press and defend the policy of gouging rape victims.
Either Sarah Palin was the most incompetent mayor in the world, or she knew her administration had instituted a policy of charging rape victims for their own rape exams, which caused so much stir that it led to a statewide law. Why did it take the Alaska legislature to reverse the policy? Shouldn’t Palin had done it herself, without the state having to step in?
It’s worth mentioning again that Wasilla’s form of gouging rape victims is now pretty much illegal nationwide, thanks to VAWA legislation, which was primarily authored by Joe Biden. John McCain, in case you’re wondering, voted against VAWA.
(And a big curtsy to Charles for links provided.)
Where exactly in those Wasilla documents is this detailed? Huffington does not link to it directly nor provide direct, relevant quotes.
Also, “Eight years ago, complaints about charging rape victims for medical exams in Wasilla…” does not say who made the complaints that moved the legislature to act. Was it actual victims, or more likely the case, the insurance companies themselves?
We now have someone that can be quoted, but for this to make the MSM, hard evidence is required.
If you look at the financial reports for the various fiscal years under the City of Wasilla: Document Central – City Documents – Recently Requested – Former Mayor Palin heading you will see a line item labeled “Contingency.” In the FY ’95 report it is shown on page 16. In the FY ’99 report it’s on page 41. (Annoyingly, the report PDFs are photocopies of documents rather than actual text in PDF form, so there’s no way to search them, you have to read them through.)
The tricky part is that there’s no indication in the financial reports that this contingency fund was used to pay for rape kits. In the FY ’95 report the contingency item is listed in the general fund; in FY ’99 it’s broken out under public safety. I don’t know anything about municipal budgeting or accounting, but it seems to me that it’s going to be hard to nail anyone on this if the line item in question is just called contingency — that could be anything. Maybe it was to pay for rock salt for roads and the winter of 1999 was exceptionally mild. Unless you can get a city official (former or current, preferably current) to testify, and, ideally, document, that this was money specifically allocated for rape kits, I don’t see a smoking gun here.
Again, I really, really want it to be true, but I want it to be solidly documented and impossible to weasel out of. It would be worth asking, if Palin maintains that this money was not for rape kits, under what line item did the kits fall? I would also like to see rape victim(s) go public and state that they or their insurance weren’t charged for rape kits under Stein/Stambaugh but were under Palin/Fannon (I am not trying to put the burden of proof on the victims here!!! I am just thinking out loud of other ways to prove that this was instituted under Palin.).
(One thing I would note: yes, the report is over 100 pages long, but the actual budget breakouts take up much less than that, maybe 10-20 pages at most. I would expect the mayor to look over those numbers carefully before signing the report.)
At this point, we have the testimony of the previous police chief about how rape exams were budgeted, and that during his time rape victims didn’t pay for their own kits.
It seems to me very unlikely that he’s lying — especially since Palin’s representatives have not, so far, claimed that he’s lying. Nor, as far as I know, have they denied that this policy didn’t exist before Palin’s administration. Is there any reason to doubt the former chief?
Good point about the numbers, Lu. It isn’t too much to expect that a competent mayor would read the town budget in detail.
I don’t think Stambaugh is lying at all; I just think we still don’t have enough solid evidence. The whole thing could very easily turn into a he-said-she-said. If Palin were asked directly about the rape-kit policy (which afaik she hasn’t been yet) she could say she had no knowledge of such a policy (at least until Fannon spoke on the record) and that she didn’t know the kits came out of the contingency fund, she merely thought that, as the name implies, it was money for miscellaneous unanticipated expenses. She could say she didn’t change the policy after she became aware of it because she knew plans were already afoot to change the state law.
She could also point out that, since she fired Stambaugh, that could motivate him to lie to make her look bad.
All of which would be baloney, to use the politest possible word that begins with a b, but it would be almost impossible to pin Palin down on it.
“Was it actual victims, or more likely the case, the insurance companies themselves?”
jed, this passage from the linked USA Today article answers your question:
There is hard evidence that Wasilla police charged rape victims for rape kits, that this practice started under Palin’s police chief, and that Palin’s police chief spoke out against the law outlawing this practice. There is no evidence that Palin disciplined her police chief in any way for speaking out against this law, and there is hard evidence that Palin instituted a gag order on the city employees, that they could not speak to the press without her permission. Without any evidence to the contrary, it is hard to imagine that Palin was unaware of the practice, at least by the point that her police chief was complaining about the horrible $1/per citizen per year burden that not charging rape victims for evidence collecting might put on the citizenry of Wasilla.
As to what it will take to get the MSM to cover it, I think you’d be hard pressed to find a more mainstream press organization than USA Today. Reliably available in every airport, frequently given out free as a courtesy in hotels, it is the middle-brow cousin to the New York Times. Still, it would be nice to see the NYTimes pick it up as well.
Wingers hate the NYT because of its alleged liberal bias. (I don’t know how regurgitating GOP press releases counts as liberal bias, but never mind.) Of course, wingers aren’t going to vote for Obama no matter what, but a lot of people, including those swing voters we all know and love, perceive it as liberal — and there’s no doubt that it has a liberal editorial bias, although its news articles are something else again. I think USA Today is more likely to get to people. As you point out, Charles, it’s much more widely available and more often passed along.
Your list of facts in evidence is compelling, but I still think the evidence for the policy’s having begun under Palin is not so ironclad as we would like.