10 hours to solve a sex crime

“Brenda Smith” — her pseudonym in court documents — talks with surprising calmness as she recounts the night a man sexually assaulted her.

It began when the working mother of a teenage daughter paired up with a friend for a rare night out in July 2015. They drank at a few Sixth Street hot spots, and by 11 o’clock, she was tired and admittedly drunk. Her friends arranged a ride home through Lyft, then got her to the waiting four-door car at Fifth and Trinity streets.

Brenda passed out in the backseat on the 15-minute ride home. Still woozy, she woke up briefly to find the driver’s head on her chest. The next morning, she realized he had done far more.

Brenda called the police, and in the next gut-wrenching hours, gave statements to officers at her house before they drove her to a hospital for a forensic exam. But her sense that the investigation was on the fast track quickly gave way to disappointment as sex crime detectives were slow to follow up.

“She rescheduled the first time, and then she reached out to me to reschedule it again, and I just remember feeling, ‘I'm just not sure they understand the emotions I'm feeling and what I'm going through,’ because I was just ready to tell the story and get the process started,” Brenda says.

It’s a familiar story.

Given their caseloads and a constant stream of new reports, Austin police sex crime detectives and supervisors say they are so overworked and time-strapped that they too often bounce from investigation to investigation, victim to victim, hoping for a speedy resolution in one case before jumping to the next.

The number of cases, measured against the number of detectives assigned to the unit, reveals a stark reality: According to an American-Statesman analysis, 13 investigators had an average of 10 hours to solve any of the 1,800 cases that crossed their desks last year.

The analysis — which factored in the number of cases per person, hours per day and time spent on leave — puts a number to a long-running sentiment for detectives and others, and the calculation sheds light on a little-scrutinized factor in dealing with sex crimes.

It comes at a time when Austin police have been criticized for how they handle such cases.

“Ten hours to work a sexual assault case — I can’t think of a case where that is adequate time,” said Austin Police Chief Brian Manley, who agreed that the Statesman’s analysis is an appropriate measure. “I don’t see a case where that would be sufficient.”

The 1,800 cases routed to the unit, housed in a drab city building off U.S. 183 in East Austin south of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, range from complex ones, requiring days or weeks to investigate, to simpler reports of peeping Toms that can sometimes be solved faster. But officials say they are alarmed by possible consequences of a too-busy investigative squad: leads that might not be chased, sexual assault survivors who might feel abandoned and, at worst, a predator who might go unpunished and move on to another victim.

The analysis comes at a time when the handling of sex crimes by Austin police and prosecutors is the focus of a highly charged community debate. A group of women sued the city and Travis County in 2018, claiming a flawed system works against crime victims. The federal suit is pending.

The Austin police sex crimes unit has been particularly criticized for not giving prompt attention to cases. During widespread scrutiny by the criminal justice community of the Police Department’s DNA lab two years ago, officials discovered mold growing on the outside plastic casing of untested sexual assault kits, some decades old. Scientific evidence was not damaged, but the issue raised doubts among advocacy groups about how carefully police treated critical evidence. The city has since tested all the kits, and police are now tracing new leads based on those results.

Last fall, the department again faced scrutiny for errors in labeling how detectives closed cases. Advocates questioned whether investigators were intentionally trying to skew numbers to make it appear as though they were solving more sex crimes than they were. State officials are still auditing those procedures.

Kelly White, director of the nonprofit SAFE Alliance, which provides counseling to sexual assault survivors, said clients routinely express dissatisfaction with the criminal justice process — and see a lack of people at the heart of the problem.

“They feel like there aren’t enough in the system to make a difference, to investigate and to make it to arrest, and then to make it to prosecution,” she said.

Overburdened system

Comparing Austin’s average time per case for each detective to other departments' is difficult. Sex crimes units across the country do not uniformly investigate the same crimes. For instance, Austin’s sex crimes unit investigates indecent exposure, but a neighborhood detective — not the sex crimes unit — in another city might instead handle such cases.

Manley says the sentiment that the department runs short on detectives is not unique to sex crimes. Other divisions — including those working property crimes, such as break-ins, and units tasked with solving violent crimes, such as assaults — also complain of feeling strapped.

But advocates for sex crime survivors point to a lack of cases that go all the way through the justice system as proof of a broken process that begins with — and often hinges on — a police investigation.

Travis county prosecutors are building a database to monitor sexual assault cases by law enforcement agency to determine their outcomes once they enter the judicial system. Among 79 Austin police sexual assault cases resolved in 2018, 37 defendants pleaded guilty, 29 cases were dismissed or rejected because of a lack of sufficient evidence, and eight defendants were found guilty at trial. Additionally, two were no-billed by a grand jury, one was transferred to another prosecutor's office, and one was acquitted. A final case was folded into another pending case.

Meanwhile, preliminary data released this spring showed that more than a third of 625 cases among all Travis County law enforcement agencies stopped because police lost communication with victims. Another 18 percent did not go forward after prosecutors declined to accept the cases because they thought investigators lacked evidence.

In 2012, the Police Executive Research Forum found the Austin Police Department was at least 41 investigators short — that it needed 138 but instead had 97 detectives. It said the sex crimes unit should have at least 14 detectives but had 11.

The unit currently has one less detective than the 2012 recommendation, and the number of reports in 2018 had gone up 34% in the six years since the study.

To address those worries, the department in the past three years has asked the City Council for money to create 55 new detective positions for all of its investigative units. The council last year approved funding for five and officials have dispersed them throughout the department.

Even though national law enforcement associations make recommendations on numbers of street officers, there are no national guidelines for the number of detectives a department should maintain.

Still, officials say keeping a sufficient number of sex crimes investigators is particularly crucial. Second to homicide, they consider sexual assaults the most intrusive person-on-person crime. Such crimes also are among the most challenging to investigate.

On the ground, detectives say they don’t need math to show an overburdened system. They feel the symptoms day in, day out.

For two years, Detective Steven McCormick was at his desk in a row of cubicles by 7:30 a.m., following a routine he said frequently left him overwhelmed. At any given time, he juggled 15 to 30 cases.

Each morning, he logged on to see new reports his sergeant had assigned to his mounting pile and started making calls to victims to set up interviews.

On a typical day, he might also have victim interviews in other cases, each taking up to a couple of hours as they walked him through the traumatic details of what happened. Then, he said, he would spend the rest of his day running down witnesses or an array of evidence, such as business security video.

“You always felt like you had a heavy responsibility,” said McCormick, who recently transferred to the department’s special investigations unit. “In order to get one thing done, you had to put something else on the back burner, constantly triaging the things you have to do.”

White said SAFE Alliance clients frequently complain that they feel as though investigators did not respond quickly enough, even in instances in which detectives appeared to find their accusations credible.

“It's retraumatizing, and many of them feel it's easier to just let it go and to just try to get on with my life and at some point it's just giving up in anger,” White said.

Resolution at last

Brenda considered giving up multiple times, especially when she felt as though she had to push for attention to her case.

Six days after the attack, she and the detective assigned to her case had finally settled on a meeting time, and she went to sex crimes headquarters to give her full account of what happened.

In a sterile room conference with a victims’ counselor at her side, Brenda told the investigator that she woke up the morning after the assault about 5 a.m. and started looking for her keys, debit card and earring. She found some of her belongings under her bed and her key in the door, making her think that the Lyft driver had unlocked her house because she was too intoxicated.

At the same time, she noticed pain in intimate areas and that her lips were bruised.

Looking back at her phone and the history of the Lyft transaction, Brenda gave police the driver’s first name: Angel.

A month later, investigators had gotten information from Lyft for the driver’s full identity: He was 37-year-old Angel Interial.

Detectives got a search warrant to collect his DNA, which was sent to a lab for testing. Two years later, the result came back — a match with Interial, who was arrested and charged in the assault.

Brenda said investigators provided updates throughout the investigation. But she always felt as if she had to ask first.

“I was definitely looking for them to hopefully guide me and keep me engaged, and make me feel like they were there for me,” she said.

Nearly four years after the attack, Interial pleaded guilty in February and was sentenced to two years in prison. Brenda said she realizes he will be out in less time, but she wanted to make sure he must register as a sex offender as part of the deal.

Now that he is in jail, she said she is finally able to pause to feel proud she pushed for justice.

“It's a long, grueling process, and you definitely have to advocate for yourself,” she said.