Q: What are lessons to be taken from this case, especially for law enforcement?
DeWine: There are several differences now that we have social media. One is that — not just in rape cases, but in almost every case — we have so much more data available for law enforcement to try to recover. Cellphones are just one example. In almost every case, someone's cellphone can provide invaluable information. That makes it more burdensome and difficult, but it does help you get at what the truth is. … So it's kind of a strange situation where the availability of information – because of video, cellphones – may be fundamentally different, but the crime itself is the same and what you have to prove is the same.
You have to make a distinction between someone who doesn't really know anything about the case posting a bunch of garbage on social media, which can be very hurtful to either witnesses or bystanders. That's what we're seeing in Steubenville. Just ridiculous things posted on the Internet. You distinguish that from things that are relevant from people who might know something or – I'm not talking about Steubenville here — maybe an admission or a statement by one of the parties or one of the defendants. Some's relevant; some's just total garbage.
Q: After the shootings in Newtown, Conn., you were measured in your remarks about whether teachers should be armed. Weeks later, have your views changed?
DeWine: No. We're trying to be "value added" in this whole issue of how you keep kids safe in schools. First, as we try to make kids safer in schools, we need to acknowledge that school is a very safe place for children. The odds of something happening are not very great. But you have to prepare, so we've developed, because teachers are the first responders, a course – a four-hour session — we're offering statewide to schools that focused on two things:
• What we’ve learned in the past so that we’re better informed about how we identify someone who might be a potential shooter in a school.
• What do you do if there’s an active shooter in the school? What have we learned from past tragedies?
We are offering that course and, in fact, have scheduled more than 60 sessions already. We’ve taped the session and, within the next week, I will send a copy of that video to every school in the state so that, if they can’t come to our live session, they’ll be able to have a training session.
The other thing that we do? There was a law passed a number of years ago and every school building is supposed to report to the attorney general with a school safety plan. We found, after (the shootings in) Chardon and again after Sandy Hook, that there were a number of schools that had not complied with that. So we’ve been calling them, and we’re now down to only about three or four that have not complied. …
I was asked at a press conference about guns in schools, and my opinion has not changed. I believe that if I was on a school board, I would think about having someone in that school who was well-trained in the use of firearms and had access to a firearm. Ideally, if money were no object, you would have a law-enforcement officer in that school. The next best thing, it seems to me, would be to have someone who has extensive training in law enforcement and who actually works in that school.
Q: What level of training would you consider to be sufficient? Those in law enforcement have told us that the training for a concealed-carry permit isn’t enough.
DeWine: I totally agree with that sentiment. You really have to have someone who has extensive training. One of things we provide — we started doing it a few months ago for law-enforcement officers — is simulators. We have about 400 different scenarios. One of the scenarios is an active shooter in a school. I looked at one and what you figure out when you see that is just how difficult it is for anybody who is trying to deal with a shooter in a school. You have to make life-and-death decisions very quickly. You have to make sure you're looking at the shooter and that it's not just someone who has their hands in their pockets, reaching in for their cellphone. These are just tough situations.
Q: Why should Ohioans be concerned about Internet cafes?
DeWine: We have 840 "mini-casinos" in this state that are now totally unregulated. We don't know who owns them. We don't know if the people who own them have felony convictions. We don't know if the people who own them are associated with organized crime. We don't know if the people who work there have criminal records. The consumer who walks in has no idea what the payout is going to be. All those things are different than every other form of gambling in the state. At casinos, 85 percent of the money from a slot machine has to come back to the people playing the game. Racetracks are the same thing. Everybody associated with a casino has to have a background check. The state monitors where the money is flowing. So it's strange that we now have these 840 mini-casinos that exist in kind of a wild, wild West – with no regulation at all. Yet every other form of gambling in the state – that is out in the open – is, in fact, very strictly regulated. So I think it's a consumer issue and a law-enforcement issue.
We have several investigations going on. I can’t talk about them, but I can tell you what we do know. We do know that some of the money is going overseas. We know that there’s money laundering going on. And we know that there are other crimes being committed.
Q: Speaking of consumer protection, you created the Identity Theft Unit last year to help protect consumers. How big a problem is identity theft in Ohio?
DeWine: Almost in any group I go to, or any social gathering, if there's a discussion about this issue, there'll be someone who's been a victim of identity theft. My daughter a few years ago was a victim of identity theft. So it's very prevalent. It's probably under-reported. …
This is one segment of the (overall) consumer outreach we have. We get overall about 30,000 phone calls every year from people who have a consumer problem. We deal with each one of them and try to help them. We have (used) prosecutors and criminal investigators so, if we start seeing a pattern with a company or an individual that we believe is a criminal violation, we not only warn people and get restitution, but we begin a criminal investigation. Ultimately we turn that over to the local county prosecutor. And that's a fundamental difference. Historically, the attorney general's office has dealt with these cases from a civil point of view, which is important, for restitution; but we've added the component of the criminal investigation.
Q: What form does identity theft usually take?
DeWine: Here's one way that people might not think about. We've had employment applications stolen. In other words, a company has employment applications and you have to fill it out with your Social Security number, references, banks – you know, all the stuff you might want put on an extensive application. And they get stolen. So now, whoever has stolen them has 50 identifications of 50 different people.
Q: What’s the feedback your office is getting on the use of the mortgage settlement money for the Moving Ohio Forward grants?
DeWine: It's been a great success. It fills a real need that communities have. There's no community in the state that doesn't have abandoned homes. Some of them have thousands of abandoned homes. Dayton, for example, has more abandoned homes per capita — I was told by Dayton officials — than any other city in the state. I took the $75 million from the robo-signing settlement, which is non-tax dollars — this is money supplied by the mortgage servicers because they did bad things – and we, the attorney generals, settled with them. I took the $75 million and spread it around the state to local communities to be spent for demolition of these homes. The reason I did it? You can walk down a street in Dayton and you'll see a house and kids playing. In that house are parents who are raising their kids, paying their mortgage and taxes. One door down is an abandoned home. Five doors down is what's become a crack house. The people who remain in these neighborhoods are really, truly victims. We're trying to get rid of this cancer, cut this cancer out, and help local communities do that.
Q: Discuss your office’s efforts at obtaining DNA from felons.
DeWine: DNA is a wonderful thing. It was not available when I was Greene County prosecutor. It is available today. We get hits on about 150 cases a month at the Bureau of Criminal Investigation, which means we're able to go back to a local law enforcement agency and tell them that unknown DNA they have supplied us from a crime scene now matches.
To be clear, let’s say you have a rape case and the victim does not know the assailant and he gets away. When I was county prosecutor, that case would probably never be solved. Today, we have the assailant’s DNA. We put that in the national DNA database and compare it with 11-million-plus profiles, and many, many times get a match of a known DNA and we then know who committed that crime. Sometimes we don’t get a match with known DNA but we put in unknown DNA and we get a match with other unknown DNA. So, for example, you might have a rape in Montgomery County and we put that DNA in and it matches an unknown DNA from a rape case in Franklin County. Now those two police departments know that they have the same suspect, and they can at least compare notes.
DNA is great. You can exonerate the innocent and clear people out of investigations early, and you can also pinpoint who the real perpetrator is.
Q: At what stage are the DNA swabs taken?
DeWine: It used to be taken with those individuals who were convicted of a felony. Today it's been expanded, as of July 1, 2011, to include people who are arrested for felonies and that goes in the database.
We had a case that occurred in Englewood. On July 2, 2011, a guy is going through Madison County and he’s picked up and charged with abduction. They take his DNA, give it to us at BCI, we run it and get a hit, and it matches up with a case that had been pending, unsolved, for 10 years in Englewood where a 14-year-old girl was raped in her own home, and they had no suspect. But they took his DNA from the scene and that unknown DNA stayed in the database for 10 years – no matches. But after 10 years, in July 2011, it matched up to the guy who was charged in Madison County. Montgomery County subsequently prosecuted this guy and he was sent away on the crime of rape.
Q: If a person who is arrested is found to be innocent of charges, is the state going to hang onto the DNA?
DeWine: There is now a provision — which we asked the General Assembly to enact, which they did — which clarifies the law and gives a path for the judge to order that DNA to be pulled out at that time.
Q: What’s the biggest law enforcement issue in Ohio that doesn’t receive enough attention?
DeWine: I was first told about this by the Montgomery County sheriff a couple of years ago, and I've seen it more and more as I travel around the state and talk to law enforcement. I think it's under-reported and under-realized. That is the gang problem we have in the state.
This is not your old stereotype of gangs. We’re finding gangs, obviously, in prisons, but also in Dayton and in cities the size of Springfield, Lima and Mansfield. And these gangs are connected to all kinds of crime. So when we’ve tried to look at how you deal with drugs, how you deal with the high rates of homicide in our cities, part of the key to understanding that and part of the solution has to be how we identify these individuals in these gangs and how we deal with these gangs. Every department is wrestling with that. I don’t think that’s been as well understood by the general public, as it is by law-enforcement officers.
Q: You’ve been very active as attorney general. Are you enjoying the job?
DeWine: I love the job. A lot of different things in my career prepared me for this job, especially my work as a prosecuting attorney in Greene County. My wife, Fran, always said to people when I was in the Senate that, if you really want to understand Mike, you have to understand that he's a prosecutor at heart. Our job in the attorney general's office is to protect Ohio families and that's what I tell our team, whether it's trying to protect people from consumer ripoffs or whether it's setting up a sexual predator unit at BCI, which is new and we're doing. Whatever we do, it's about protecting Ohio families. The breadth of the job is fascinating, and the ability you have as attorney general to touch so many lives in Ohio … is just amazing. It's a great job.
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