In Nome, Alaska, review of rape ‘cold cases’ hits a wall

NOME, ALASKA >> The two cops — the cold case detective from Virginia and the evidence technician from Alaska — had a mission. Sift through more than a decade of grim stories from this small city set between the Bering Strait and Alaska’s western tundra.

Nome’s new police chief, another Virginia transplant, asked the two to untangle whether the city’s police department had failed hundreds of people — most of them Alaska Native women — who had reported they’d been sexually assaulted.

So they spent weeks inside the police station on the edge of town, squinting at computer screens and stacks of paper. What they found horrified them.

Again and again, the files showed, officers had failed to investigate rapes and other sexual crimes. In some cases, the two cops say, officers had never questioned the suspect.

In other cases, they say, dispatchers had taken distraught calls from women saying they’d been sexually assaulted, and no one from the department had bothered to go to talk to them.

“I’ve never seen anything like that in my career,” said the cold case investigator, Jerry Kennon.

The two cops had uncovered evidence confirming a pattern of inaction that a local group of sexual assault survivors had been protesting for years — a law enforcement failure that the Alaska chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union recently described as “a systemic, decades-long indifference to the safety of Alaska Native women.”

This story was produced through a partnership with National

Native News with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

What has been happening in Nome isn’t an isolated episode in the struggle over sexual assault and institutional accountability. Many law enforcement agencies in small communities across the United States are facing questions about how aggressively they pursue reports of sexual violence.