Palin And Sex Crimes
I'm back again to beat up on Sarah Palin, but only because she deserves it.
Under Palin's watch as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, population 7,000, an item that forms at least half of her resume to be Vice President of the United States, her hand-picked police chief, Fannon, charged alleged victims of sexual assault for the cost of the forensic rape kits.
It went like this - you went to a police officer in Wasilla, and said, "I've been raped. I want forensic evidence gathered from my body so that justice can be done." The police officer then replied, "Sure, as soon as you pay me $1,000 to cover my costs."
I'm going to summarize the above paragraph. If you wanted your sexual assault investigated, you had to pay the police to do it. Which is interesting in its contrast to EVERY OTHER POLICE SERVICE, which was provided to the public at the city's expense. If you, the victim, wanted the police to do their duty regarding your rape, you had to PAY them. Chief Fannon fought to keep this policy going even after it was prohibited on the state level by a legislature reeling in nausea at the very suggestion.
So the exciting question that follows is, did Mayor Palin, or did Mayor Palin not, know that this was going on? Some of Palin's supporters say she didn't know. The McCain-Palin campaign insists that Palin has always been the fatal foe of sexual assault, in spite of the fact that the most visible thing she has done about Alaska's rate of reported sexual assaults being 2.5 times the national average is to fire Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan when he bucked her authority as governor by going to Washington to get money to combat the problem (if that is the reason she fired Monegan, as she claims, not because Monegan refused to cave in to her criminal pressure to fire her former brother-in-law, as is the allegation of a state-level investigation into the matter that the governor has "declined to participate in"; meaning she has ordered her camp to ignore the state's subpoenas in defiance of law).
Other Palin supporters argue that she did know, but she was just doing her duty of keeping the city's expenses low.
So Palin is either a fool or a devil, but probably both. Either the mayor of a town of 7,000 residents, in a state with sexual assault rates two and a half times higher than the national average, did not know that her hand-picked police chief was charging the victims of sexual assault to investigate the crimes, and therefore she was asleep at the switch, or, in the interest of saving about ten thousand dollars a year out of a city budget of more than fifty million, she looked at a list of people she could stick it to, and she chose rape victims.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/21/palin.rape.exams/index.html
Under Palin's watch as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, population 7,000, an item that forms at least half of her resume to be Vice President of the United States, her hand-picked police chief, Fannon, charged alleged victims of sexual assault for the cost of the forensic rape kits.
It went like this - you went to a police officer in Wasilla, and said, "I've been raped. I want forensic evidence gathered from my body so that justice can be done." The police officer then replied, "Sure, as soon as you pay me $1,000 to cover my costs."
I'm going to summarize the above paragraph. If you wanted your sexual assault investigated, you had to pay the police to do it. Which is interesting in its contrast to EVERY OTHER POLICE SERVICE, which was provided to the public at the city's expense. If you, the victim, wanted the police to do their duty regarding your rape, you had to PAY them. Chief Fannon fought to keep this policy going even after it was prohibited on the state level by a legislature reeling in nausea at the very suggestion.
So the exciting question that follows is, did Mayor Palin, or did Mayor Palin not, know that this was going on? Some of Palin's supporters say she didn't know. The McCain-Palin campaign insists that Palin has always been the fatal foe of sexual assault, in spite of the fact that the most visible thing she has done about Alaska's rate of reported sexual assaults being 2.5 times the national average is to fire Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan when he bucked her authority as governor by going to Washington to get money to combat the problem (if that is the reason she fired Monegan, as she claims, not because Monegan refused to cave in to her criminal pressure to fire her former brother-in-law, as is the allegation of a state-level investigation into the matter that the governor has "declined to participate in"; meaning she has ordered her camp to ignore the state's subpoenas in defiance of law).
Other Palin supporters argue that she did know, but she was just doing her duty of keeping the city's expenses low.
So Palin is either a fool or a devil, but probably both. Either the mayor of a town of 7,000 residents, in a state with sexual assault rates two and a half times higher than the national average, did not know that her hand-picked police chief was charging the victims of sexual assault to investigate the crimes, and therefore she was asleep at the switch, or, in the interest of saving about ten thousand dollars a year out of a city budget of more than fifty million, she looked at a list of people she could stick it to, and she chose rape victims.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/21/palin.rape.exams/index.html