New assault highlights history of rapes in CSP vans

Five days after an alleged rape inside a Community Service Patrol van in Anchorage, another woman said she was assaulted in a CSP van early Wednesday morning.

Since 2004 there have been at least four other rapes in CSP vans, according to Sgt. Ken McCoy, head of the Anchorage Police Department's Special Victims Unit.

"I'd like to say this is a rare occurrence, but it's not," McCoy said.

CSP vans patrol certain Anchorage neighborhoods, picking up willing homeless people incapacitated by alcohol and taking them to either the CSP sleep-off facility or, if necessary, to a hospital.

On Friday afternoon two CSP workers picked up a homeless woman in downtown Anchorage. A few minutes later the workers picked up a homeless 44-year-old man. Both the woman and the man were drunk, according to a police report.

After the CSP workers drove on, the man allegedly began to rape the unconscious woman. When the CSP workers noticed, they pulled the van over, stopped the assault, and called police.

Wednesday morning another sexual assault allegedly took place in a CSP van. Two CSP workers left two men and a woman in the van, and the woman told police that while the CSP employees were gone, one of the men groped her against her will.

The two cases over the past week are similar to past assaults.

In 2006 two CSP workers left a van to talk with a homeless person near the Alaska Native Medical Center, leaving two homeless men and a woman in the van. While they were gone one of the men raped the unconscious woman, telling the other man, "Oh, this is my girlfriend," according to the Anchorage Daily News story. After that assault, CSP manager Richard Gauntt said the CSP workers had not violated staff policy when they left the woman and two men alone together.

That's the same argument heard from officials after Friday's rape. Helena Hall, senior corporate counsel for Nana Management Services, which operates CSP, said that both the Anchorage Fire Department and Standing Together Against Rape gave the opinion that CSP didn't violate the procedures currently in place.

"My belief is that we followed the procedures and did not do anything wrong," Hall said.

Hall also said the fire department sets the guidelines that NMS follows. The fire department declined to release those guidelines.

Gauntt, the CSP manager, did not return multiple phone calls seeking comment.

The CSP vans and the transfer station (a sleep-off center in the Anchorage Correctional Complex) are managed by the Anchorage Fire Department, paid for mostly by the municipality, and operated by NMS, a subsidiary of NANA Regional Corp. Inc. NANA receives $1.37 million for running the vans and transfer station.

McCoy said there were at least 10 sexual assaults in the CSP transfer station between 2000 and 2007, but none since 2007. The reason was a simple change: CSP began separating men and women, he said. While he acknowledged that logistically that might be tough to do with the vans, "maybe there's a better way of doing things," he said.

A report on sexual violence released last year by the municipal Department of Health and Human Services includes a section on the homeless.

"Levels of victimization that women endure before, during and after episodes of homelessness are enormously high, often occurring in multiple settings at the hands of multiple perpetrators," the report stated. The report also said that it's difficult to prosecute sexual assault cases involving the homeless.

John Joseph Charlie, the alleged perpetrator of Friday's assault, was charged with sexual assault in the second degree.

Friday and Wednesday's alleged attacks bring the of sexual assaults in CSP vans up to at least six since 2004, or about one a year.

After the 2006 rape Gauntt told the Anchorage Daily News, "Hopefully we won't have any problems like this in the future. We'll do everything we can to see that we don't."

Contact Joshua Saul at jsaul(at)alaskadispatch.com.