On of the things I have noticed during my internship is the fragile but important relationship between law enforcement and the DA's office. Sacramento county is backed up in case work and the DA's office wither not taking certain cases or pleading out with almost no punishment for certain offenders. This pertains to the insurance fraud division as well. Because there are so many cases of insurance fraud, not all cases are pursued and people simply get away with it. Putting it as simple as possible I would say that as long as a person doesn't commit a major case of insurance fraud they will not be prosecuted and even then some of the larger cases are turned down because the DA will say there is not enough evidence. There have been incidents where detectives have been working a case for a over a month and believe they have all the evidence they need to make an arrest and the DA will deny a warrant request because the case wouldn't be an "easy" win. Now I say these things based on my perspective of listening to the detectives. I do not believe the DAs are just looking for easy wins to boost their resume, I believe the issue again lies in the amount of cases that are being tried and the courts being backed up. To be cost efficient with the budget, only bigger cases with strong evidence are being considered for pursuit.
Part of my duties as an intern is too look over fraud claims sent in from Insurance companies. reading through the claims I am able to tell which claims the department will be able to pursue and which will be turned down due to the amount of loss related to the claim, no injuries, or lack of evidence to investigate.
Too many criminals, not enough good guys.
A few of my relatives live in Sacramento at the Elk Grove area. They were lucky to have sold their houses in San Francisco fifteen years ago and bought their homes there in Sacramento. There had been many incidences that involved my nieces and nephews and their involvement with drugs had some run ins with the law. And a lot of their cases, they literally walked free. After reading your blog about the selection of certain files by the district attorney's office perhaps led me to believe that my nieces and nephews cases were not pure luck at all. Perhaps the reasons behind their mere luck would be that the county is overworked, overloaded with cases and maybe led to insufficient evidences with cases.
ReplyDeleteThis is very interesting information, I never realized the difficulty in pursuing criminals, let alone inability of the DA to not have enough evidence to prosecute. It is a shame that fraud is so rampant and even worse that they get away with it. Your internship sounds very interesting and I wish you luck in your endeavors in law enforcement, we need more good guys looking to weed out the bad guys.
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