Crowdfunding Criminal Justice: Lots of Promise, Lots of Pitfalls

It was 2015, and Detective Sergeant William Carter of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department had already spent several years trying to crack a two-decade-old cold case on his spare time — the 1993 rape and murder of 19-year-old Carmen Hope Van Huss. As the Indianapolis Star reported at the time, Carter turned to crowdfunding to pay for a DNA test that he hoped might produce a lead after the wrong DNA was sent to a lab on the city’s dime and officials wouldn’t cough up another $1,600.

Carter’s department seemed at a loss about how to respond to this turn of events, first saying they’d pulled him from the case and then walking that back. While the department denied that Carter’s crowdfunding petition was what led them to remove him from the case (he’d raised over $1,200), the whole saga reflects how unorthodox this was at the time — private crowdfunding to pay for the analysis of DNA evidence in a cold case under investigation by law enforcement.

What a difference seven years can make. In a recent article titled “The True Crime-Obsessed Philanthropists Paying to Catch Killers,” the New York Times profiled the zealous amateur detectives — and donors — who are part of a growing grassroots movement of DNA enthusiasts doing pretty much the same thing Carter tried to do, but on a larger scale and with a lot more buy-in from the cops.

From a Sin City-based donor group calling themselves the Vegas Justice League to Season of Justice, a nonprofit founded by the host of a popular true-crime podcast, the modus operandi of these justice seekers is simple. To help solve cold cases and other crimes for which strained police budgets can’t spare the coin, they donate or raise money to sequence and process DNA evidence. Then they pay to run it through consumer DNA databases like GEDMatch and FamilyTreeDNA.

Though those databases were set up with garden-variety genealogical research in mind, their heady growth over the past several years has enabled investigators to identify suspects’ relatives, and even whole family trees, and thus zero in on actual perpetrators. It’s how, in 2018, the FBI caught the notorious “Golden State Killer,” a serial murderer and rapist who committed his crimes decades ago.

According to the Times, the largest DNA testing titans — like Ancestry.com and 23andMe — “have largely resisted police access to their databases.” But often, databases compiled by GEDMatch and FamilyTreeDNA will suffice. Even back in 2018, GEDMatch was on the verge of being capable of identifying the DNA of nearly every American of Northern European descent.

A promising prospect

Despite some early reservations on privacy and procedural grounds, charitable giving for this tech-enabled form of crime-fighting appears to be on the rise. That makes sense, because it’s a pretty good investment. Even though the Times reports that donors across the country have given around $1 million to the cause in total — peanuts in the grander philanthropic scheme — cost per case for DNA sequencing and genealogical analysis often only runs in the low thousands. That could mean dozens, even hundreds, of cases solved per million dollars spent.

It’s an interesting example of how charitable funding and new technology can come together in an innovative way to make progress on a problem with no real solution in sight. On the other hand, it’s also another instance of private philanthropy augmenting strained public budgets, and in so doing, provoking questions about public accountability, equity and oversight.

On the positive side, this is arguably cost-effective and deeply satisfying philanthropy. In an era of heightened fears about violent crime and doubts about the efficacy and equity of law enforcement, directly contributing to the closure of a cold case is a compelling philanthropic prospect.

In a way, giving money to catch violent felons who think they’ve gotten away with it echoes how funders have backed DNA analysis to exonerate people who’ve been wrongly incarcerated — part of the work of justice reform organizations like The Innocence Project. There’s a certain kind of narrative appeal in both cases, which may be why true-crime buffs have flocked to fund Season of Justice, and why bestselling author John Grisham sits on The Innocence Project’s board.

Lots of caveats

Then again, there are some big caveats to all of this. For one thing, there’s the privacy question. Is it appropriate for law enforcement agencies to trawl through gargantuan genetic databases and triangulate the identities of suspected criminals (or anyone else for that matter), even if it’s only our second cousins’ DNA that actually made it into these repositories? And is it appropriate for private enthusiasts to pay for and even take part in those investigations? For better or for worse, the exponential growth of these DNA compendiums may already have let the cat out of the bag where privacy’s concerned.

Racial equity is, as always, another concern. Mirroring longstanding trends in media coverage of criminal cases, DNA evidence funders seem to be giving disproportionate attention to those involving white victims, often young and female, according to law professor Natalie Ram in the New York Times. There’s also the fact that white Americans are disproportionately represented in these databases, which can limit their usefulness for cases involving victims and/or perpetrators of color.

In that sense, philanthropic funding to apply DNA analysis to these cases may end up reproducing racial inequities already present elsewhere in the justice system. Compare that to philanthropy in the related field of rape kit reform, where funders are specifically seeking to correct existing systemic inequities.

One opportunity for larger funders interested in this sort of thing would be to seek out and fund DNA analysis in specific cases involving victims of color. Funders might even consider setting up some sort of collaborative funding hub with that mission, which could then also manage crowdfunding campaigns around individual cases or take in small donations directly.

Blurry lines

The final caveat here is also nothing new. This is yet another example of the increasingly blurry line between private philanthropy and the public sector. Not to say public-private partnerships are a bad thing — public budgets only go so far, especially on the local level, and there are plenty of ways for philanthropy to fill those gaps to good effect.

However, questions arise when law enforcement is the public good being resourced. It goes without saying that a system of law enforcement in which private funders determine priorities and foot most of the bill wouldn’t be law enforcement at all, but something tantamount to vigilantism. Something else to keep in mind is that funding all of this DNA analysis is a cash cow for the private labs and databases involved, introducing another set of private interests into the public safety equation.

Still, if grantmakers and individual donors can keep these considerations in mind and find ways to address them, this is one promising avenue for philanthropy to help ease the burden on law enforcement and secure some closure for families who’ve waited decades for justice.

Featured