UPDATED: DSK Meets SVU - Law Enforcement Grows Up

Dontcha just love the NY Post!

UPDATE:
So the DSK sexual assault of a hotel housekeeper case being brought by the New York City District Attorney's Office is falling apart, not on the DSK side of the continuing investigation, but on the victim side.  If you don't follow crime news and trial coverage on TV, you might not be aware that detectives started investigating the victim the second the crime was reported, and the investigation into every aspect of her life continues, as it must if there is to be a trial.

In the course of that investigation, details of her story, her friends and associates, her finances, and her immigration history turned out to be way more interesting than they should have been if she was an ideal victim, say, a nun assaulted as she was arranging the altar for Mass.

These discoveries weren't nearly as shocking to police, who are well aware that most people have complicated lives, and everybody lies to keep those complications to themselves, as they were to the media, who evidently experienced quite a bit of shock and outrage if the headlines and articles are to be believed.

WNL thought you might be interested in the changes in the case as the investigation has evolved, so here are a couple of quality sources to get you started.  Both of these will no doubt continue coverage all the way through, so I'll just point you in their direction.

The first source of quality coverage of DSK is The New York Times.  This story is right in their back yard and they have the staff and the connections to get into the heart of the case as it develops.  The link takes you to today's story, but within the story are links to previous stories, and there will be more to come.  Plenty of details and documentation with a minimum of hand-wringing and no ridiculous (IMO) comparisons to North Carolina's infamous Duke Lacrosse fiasco.

The second source is ex-sex abuse prosecutor Roger Canaff's excellent blog, starting with this post "Developments in the DSK Case: What They Mean And What They Don't."  The comments/discussion are almost as good as the post itself.  Two quotes:

"...many in the media (the Washington Post’s Kathleen Parker among them) are now conflating the undeniable weaknesses in the legal case and the DA’s reaction to them with the sure-fire notion that, in fact, it’s just another false allegation and we all rushed to judgment way too quickly. We must, after all, remember Duke Lacrosse."

 "...What I will do is lament the ugly confusion so many people are mired in regarding legal difficulties versus actual guilt or innocence [WNL inserted the bold type here]. And I’ll lament the increasingly binary distinction we’re making with women and men who report sexual violence. They come forward and dare- and I mean “dare” in every sense of the word- to report what happened to them. They then face, at very best, two fates: They are either perfect and thus (perhaps) supported, or they are revealed to be imperfect, sometimes even deeply flawed, and thus discarded as liars. Never mind that predators sometimes target people with real or perceived imperfections exactly because it renders them even more powerless.

So the message ought to be damn clear for the next hotel maid, accountant, bus driver, surgeon, prostitute, college student, barber, cop, etc, etc, who is sexually attacked: Unless you’re perfect, don’t tell anyone."

ORIGINAL POST:
The only thing newsworthy about the recent arrest in New York City of IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn was that he was actually arrested and has now been charged with the following list of offenses:

4 First degree felony charges
1 Second degree felony charge
1 Third degree felony charge
1 Misdemeanor

The actual acts committed by Strauss-Kahn include:

One count of attempted rape
One count of anal rape
2 counts of forced oral sex
Forcibly touching the defendants' breasts (the misdemeanor)
Unlawful imprisonment

New York is a city filled year-round with diplomats, dignitaries, high-level money manipulators, and generally privileged VIPs, and restaurants, hotels, taxi drivers, and police are all practiced in managing VIP bad behavior.  From DSK's point of view, what's the harm in assaulting a hotel housekeeper?  Surely nothing bad will come of the effort.  The hotel will stifle the employee's complaints if she is daring enough to complain at all.

Here's where things started to go right.  The housekeeper not only went to her employers immediately, the police were called, and within a few minutes of DSK's hurried departure from the hotel for the airport, the hotel room became a secure crime scene.

"Uniformed officers from the Midtown South precinct were the first to arrive at the hotel, the Sofitel New York, near Times Square, and they recorded the hotel housekeeper’s first account of what had occurred. Once it was clear her claim involved felonious sexual contact, Mr. Browne [Paul J. Browne, the department’s chief spokesman] said, they called in the members of the Manhattan Special Victims Squad.

After Mr. Strauss-Kahn was apprehended at the airport, he was taken to the squad’s Manhattan headquarters, on East 123rd Street. He stayed there overnight on Saturday, sitting for much of the time in a chair, with his feet up on another one, and declining initial offers of food.

His accuser was also brought to the squad’s office, where she identified him in a police lineup on Sunday afternoon.

And when the first official documents from the court paperwork emerged, detailing the accusations, they emphasized the words of a Special Victims Squad detective, Steven Lane, upon which they were based." (from NYT article, bold added for emphasis)

The charges Dominique Strauss-Kahn now faces, and which withstood scrutiny of a Grand Jury which could have refused to indict him on any or all, are based on evidence collecting procedures and case-building protocols painstakingly built over four decades by police departments previously unable to cope with sex-based offenses.

If you've watched Law and Order: SVU [Special Victims Unit], you've seen the TV version.  DSK is perhaps our first worldwide look at the real thing, NYPD's Special Victims Squad.  Linda A. Fairstein, who spent about a quarter-century as Manhattan’s chief sex crimes prosecutor, and has since her retirement become a best-selling crime writer, explains the additional requirements for detectives working in the Squad:

..detectives in the unit had a special skills set that helped them in dealing with victims who were often frightened or reluctant to speak.

Ms. Fairstein said the experience they gained in dealing with just these kinds of cases helped them understand the complications they could pose and the kind of skepticism such charges often encountered among the public. “The idea is that these detectives are specially trained, one, to deal with the investigation of these cases, which have very specific and often nuanced details,” she said, “and, secondly, is their manner, to deal with victims who are generally, in most circumstances, emotionally traumatized because of the intimate nature of the assaults.”

Paul Browne adds:  "the detectives chosen for such work were among the most experienced and had more seniority. They must undergo additional special training in areas like collecting DNA evidence, interviewing traumatized victims, preserving crime scenes and understanding the psychology of rapists and other sex offenders."

"They must understand the process for examining the victims physically, although nurses do the actual examinations and are also “cross-trained in child abuse and child sex abuse,” Mr. Browne said.
The investigative work can often hinge on physical or forensic examinations, starting with basic elements like clothing. “If someone grabs you, there may be skin cells or some other forensic evidence on the clothing,” Mr. Browne said."  (NYT article also cited above)

WNL:  While propositioning and assaulting hotel housekeepers, both male and female, is as old as hotels themselves, law enforcement and the judicial system, at least in locations where Special Victims Units have been established, have grown procedures and acquired forensic capabilities to get some justice when crimes involve sexual abuse, crimes that until recently almost universally have left survivors without recourse and perpetrators free to seek out new victims of opportunity.

One of the big forensic changes was the invention and development of what is popularly called a rape kit.  Linda Fairstein has a fascinating interview on the Backlog Blog (dedicated, among other things, to getting rape kits tested and out of storerooms) about the origin of rape kits and how they are used.

Since the 1970s things have changed - not enough and not everywhere - but enough to warrant this post and to point to the DSK prosecution as an example of what is different.  In addition, the innovations behind the creation of SVUs  reach out into women and children's lives beyond the behavior of a VIP in a hotel room.  The same interview, investigation, and forensic tools used in this case are used in domestic violence, child abuse, date rape, incest, and even stalking cases.

If something bad happens to you, give the Police Department where you live a chance to show you they are up to date.  You might meet the proverbial "who cares", but you might just get the support you need and the justice you deserve.