State’s Witness Protection Effort Audited

Federal and state law enforcement authorities are eager to whip out their latest reports and statistical analyses to assure the public that crime rates are plunging nationally and in California.

But while crime is going down, the cost of fighting it in an obscure office in the state Department of Justice has risen dramatically. In less than a year, the state’s witness protection program, which is less than two years old and is modeled on a much larger federal version, has more than tripled in size. The sudden increase has caught the attention of state auditors.

The tiny operation, staffed by a single full-time worker and a part-time helper, already has spent or approved $2.2 million to provide armed protection, relocate and arrange new identities for witnesses in major crime cases, according the state auditor.

In the first 10 months of 1999 alone, the California Bureau of State Audits said in a report last week, the program’s expenditures soared 223%.

For years, federal witness protection programs have become grist for news coverage, television programs and movies. But it may surprise Californians outside the law enforcement community that the state operates an enterprise to shield witnesses from actual or threatened intimidation, particularly in gang-related murder and drug trafficking cases.

Witnesses may be assigned an armed guard, a fictitious identity, a new residence, and funds for housing and utility deposits. Protection may last six months or longer and may include witnesses’ relatives or friends.

In exchange, they must agree to testify truthfully, obey all laws, comply with civil judgments, cooperate with protection authorities and regularly report their addresses to law enforcement.

The audit, the second of its kind since February, faulted the program for failure to install some of the stronger management controls recommended earlier, but said improvements had been made.

State Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer responded that he had sought additional funds to carry out key recommendations but had been rebuffed by the state Department of Finance, which controls California’s purse strings.

The auditors called attention to a low-profile, crime-fighting initiative created in 1997 by the Legislature and then-Gov. Pete Wilson to help improve conviction rates in major cases.

At the time, Assemblyman Bob Hertzberg (D-Sherman Oaks), lead author of the bill that became the law, contended that gang murderers, particularly in Los Angeles, were going free, partly because witnesses were afraid to testify.

“We can’t possibly expect to solve California’s most serious criminal cases unless we afford witnesses the necessary protections that encourage them to come forth and expose dangerous criminals,” he said.

For some time, county district attorneys have operated limited local witness protection programs without financial aid from the state. The new law offered them an extra $3 million a year in state aid.

The statute took effect on Jan. 1, 1998, and may have established one of the quickest expansions of government in years, at least from a percentage standpoint.

Under the program, county prosecutors apply to the attorney general’s office for funds to bolster their own efforts to protect witnesses. Last February, 25 county district attorneys had requested subsidies for witness protection cases, the audit report said. By September, the count was 35.

The number of witnesses granted protection soared from 154 at the start of the year to 504 by mid-October, an increase of 227%, the report said. The number of protected family members soared from 207 to 711 in the same period.

The number of defendants also grew, but at a slower rate: from 275 to 789, a 187% increase.

“We have been doing active outreach to let the district attorneys and law enforcement know that the program exists,” Sandra Michioku, a Lockyer spokeswoman, said Friday.

She said many local prosecutors apparently were not fully aware of the program’s substantial subsidies. “The attorney general believes we ought to let people know about it,” she said.

Michioku said that because of their size, Los Angeles and San Diego counties are major participants, but over the holiday weekend she did not have access to information on how many witnesses were being shielded in those counties, or the related costs.

The report also showed some of the difficulties in scrutinizing an agency whose mission, in part, is to protect confidentiality, which in certain cases may involve witnesses who are criminals themselves.

For example, the audit noted that invoices and receipts for expenditures are not forwarded by the district attorney to the Department of Justice for payment. Doing so may compromise the safety of a witness, so such documents are kept by the prosecutor, it said.

As a result, the Justice Department does not know, for example, if the expenditures are proper. The audit recommended that a department auditor be sent to individual prosecutors’ offices to examine documents. Lockyer responded that he would appoint an auditor to work half time on audits of the program.