David Michael Miller
Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel won office in 2014 claiming he would be tough on crime, but he’s had little interest in prosecuting the crime of rape.
Schimel began the job knowing there was a backlog of 6,006 untested rape kits as a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story had reported. But he “kept quiet” about the problem while he sought out-of-state grants, according to an investigative story by the Appleton Post Crescent.
By September of that year, Schimel announced his office had won a $4 million grant from two different sources, the District Attorney of New York and the U.S. Department of Justice, to inventory and process any untested rape kits, and he promised he would now “bring justice to sexual assault victims.”
But a year later a Post Crescent story revealed that not one kit had been tested with the grant money.
By then Schimel had gotten another $1.1 million in federal funding to process the backlogged rape kits, so he now had more than $5 million to address the problem. Yet by January 2016, his office had done little. When asked about it by the press the AG said his office has tested “hundreds” of untested kits, but two days later his spokeswoman Rebecca Ballweg admitted that just nine untested rape kits had so far been processed.
Studies had by then showed that serial sexual offenders were more common than previously thought. A 2016 report by Case Western Reserve University found that of 243 rape kits studied in 2013, at least 51 percent were linked to offenders of multiple sex crimes. Yet Schimel seemed in no rush to process the rape kits.
His various explanations, if anything, raise even more questions about his mystifying failure to do his job. At a March 2017 legislative budget hearing, Schimel told lawmakers “We wanted the grant process to move faster. It couldn’t move faster,” the Post Crescent story noted. Yet he added: “I’m proud of our progress.” This was at a point where less than 1 percent of all the backlogged rape kits had been tested.
Moreover DOJ officials offered a different view “behind the scenes,” the story noted. “In an application for federal aid two years ago, they described ‘disturbing’ resistance to the testing of rape kits from police throughout Wisconsin.”
Schimel is the state’s highest law enforcement officer. If police departments were dragging their feet on testing rape kits, why didn’t he use the bully pulpit to urge them to take action?
Perhaps because his own office was just as laggard as some of these police departments. The Green Bay police, for instance, reported back in 2014 they had 322 untested rape kits, yet nothing was done by the state until that city’s police actually drove the kits to Schimel’s office in June, 2017, the Post Crescent reported. “It was just a lot of waiting” for the state, Green Bay Lt. Jeff Brester told the paper. “Our issue was it took so long before the state allowed us to send them in.”
Schimel might also have been looking to save money, because rape kits can cost about $1,000 each to test. But even at that price, the $5.1 million in grant money could have paid for testing 5,100 rape kits.
And by delaying, Schimel is actually costing taxpayers more. To handle the embarrassing failure to process the rape kits, Schimel “has authorized more overtime and hired 11 part-time workers in an effort to speed up testing,” a Post Crescent story revealed, and may ask the Legislature “for money to pay more workers next year.”
Meanwhile the backlog of untested kits has continued to grow and reached 6,800 at its peak. Yet even with the extra overtime spending, Schimel’s office had by the most recent count tested only 1,900 rape kits.
This is a stunning level of incompetence. Schimel’s Democratic opponent, Josh Kaul, has contrasted Wisconsin’s efforts with those of Portland, Oregon. “The Portland Police Department and the local district attorney received grants for testing at the same time as Wisconsin,” the Post Crescent reported. “But Portland — a single city — tested more than three times as many kits as the entire state of Wisconsin during the first 2½ years.”
Yet Schimel feels so untouched on the issue that he went on talk radio with Green Bay radio host John Muir, a self-styled champion of “common sense conservatism,” to blast his critics. “If our crime lab stumbled on the cure for cancer, someone would criticize that — ‘Well why, didn’t you do that quicker?’” Schimel declared. “With some people that want to play politics with important things like this, you’re just never going to win.”
It’s one thing to fail. But to fail repeatedly, over a period of nearly three years and then to top it off with an arrogant dismissal of any criticism? That’s a level of incompetence that few state officials have ever achieved.
Bruce Murphy is the editor of UrbanMilwaukee.
