Blog note: even the Sacramento Bee, not noted for covering grand jury reports, weighed in on this one.
More than 500 cold criminal cases remain unsolved amid disorganization and a lack of resources to pursue them, the San Joaquin County grand jury said in a report released Friday.
The grand jury, which undertook the study following the capture of the suspected Golden State Killer, found inconsistencies across the county with various aspects of cold cases, including how they are defined. There is no universally accepted definition of a cold case, but the National Institute of Justice defines it as “any case whose probative investigative leads have been exhausted.”
Only four of the county’s nine law enforcement agencies even define what constitutes a cold case, and none is written. Instead, the grand jury reported, most agencies follow past practices and vary in approach depending on the nature of the crime.
As a result, it’s unclear how many cold cases there actually are.
Only three people in the entire San Joaquin County are assigned to investigate cold cases — and none of them is dedicated full time, the grand jury found.
Stockton has a retired police officer who works on cold case investigations part time, while the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Department has a full-time sergeant who works less than 25 percent of the time on cold cases, the grand jury reported. The San Joaquin County District Attorney’s Office has one full-time investigator dedicating 20 to 30 percent of his time to cracking unsolved cases.
The lack of staffing, the report said, has resulted in no known arrests or prosecutions involving cold case investigations in the San Joaquin County in the past five years. The Tracy Police Department closed one case, with a deceased suspect, and the Stockton Police Department closed two cases with both suspects deceased.
The grand jury made several recommendations to law enforcement agencies to address the problem.
First, it suggested that law enforcement agencies amend or create cold case definitions that include homicide, missing persons with suspicious circumstances and sexual assault.
It also recommended that the San Joaquin County District Attorney’s Office establish a Cold Case Task Force for each agency to partner with, citing other counties where the DA’s office has taken the lead on investigating cold cases.
Finally, the grand jury recommended that a few agencies restructure their staffs, to assign more investigators solely to cold cases.
The report suggested that Stockton and the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Department each put three full-time detectives on cold cases, and the San Joaquin County district attorney to dedicate two full-time investigators to the department.
May 31, 2019
The Sacramento Bee
By Meghan Bobrowsky
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