This article was originally published in The Crime Report, a criminal justice news service.
Paul Greenwood, San Diego’s Deputy District Attorney, has been
investigating crimes against the elderly for over two decades. As head
of San Diego’s Elder Abuse Unit, he’s been a front-row witness to the
tragedies such crimes have left in their wake.
“I have seen for
myself many instances where victims in their seventies, eighties,
nineties, never recover,” he said. “They don’t recover financially; they
don’t recover psychologically. And emotionally, it can be devastating
for them.”
Over the course of his career, Greenwood has emerged as
one of the country’s most outspoken advocates for elderly crime
victims. He has not only pushed California state lawmakers to pass
aggressive elder abuse reforms, but he’s also testified numerous times
before Congress, calling for a nationwide change in our approach to
elder abuse.
But the subject is still below the national radar.
That, says Greenwood, is why such crimes should be given separate
attention in the criminal code.
When President Obama cited the
need to train more prosecutors to combat elder abuse at the 2016 White
House Conference on Aging, it “was probably the first time I’ve ever
heard [a] president in the last 20 years even mention it,” said
Greenwood.
“Other crimes– particularly gang violence, child abuse,
trafficking, they seem to get the attention of the politicians. But
sadly, not so much elder abuse.”
Currently, only an estimated two percent of incidents involving financial exploitation of the elderly is reported, according to
research conducted by the National Adult Protective Services Association (NAPSA).
Nevertheless, advocates say that public awareness has been growing.
Over
the past decade, all but four states in the U.S. have passed
legislation to address elder abuse, and to a lesser extent, elder
financial exploitation.
People appear more willing to pick up a phone and call somebody when a relative or a friend is victimized.
Still, Greenwood says, it remains a challenge for public policy: “Once somebody reports it, does anything happen?”
Generally speaking, Americans view stealing from the elderly as a morally repugnant act. It is no coincidence that the
2016 amendments to
the Telemarketing and Consumer Fraud and Abuse Prevention Act draw on
several notorious cases of seniors losing everything to fraudsters.
But
for all the evocative value of such cases, there are still relatively
few local resources committed to the investigation and prosecution of
these crimes—with the exception of a few counties scattered across the
U.S
.
Despite the new legislation adopted by states over
the past decade, elder financial exploitation is still not recognized as
a crime in its own right.
“I think [this] is related to age-ism,
to be honest,” Elizabeth Loewy, former chief of the Elder Abuse Unit at
the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, said in an interview with
The Crime Report.
New
York City has a record of aggressively prosecuting elder fraud, despite
the difficulty in getting exploitation statutes passed—largely thanks
to the work of Elder Abuse and Elder Fraud Units in Manhattan, Queens,
Brooklyn, and the Bronx.
Loewy pointed to the scarce number of
Elder Abuse Units around the country, especially in comparison to
domestic violence, child abuse, and sex crimes units.
“I felt
fortunate that we had one,” said Loewy, “but we didn’t have the
resources of the other units, even though we had more cases.”
Brenda Uekert, director of the
Center for Elders and Courts, a project of the National Center for State Courts, compared it to the early days of domestic violence laws:
“Those
crimes were hidden, because people were charged with assault or
battery,” she said. “So if you were to collect statistics on domestic
violence in 1980, the crime didn’t exist, [and] the problem didn’t
exist.”
Some of the worst cases of elder financial exploitation
are not being perpetrated by strangers, but by family members and
caretakers who have access to an elder’s life savings.
“Unless you
have law enforcement and prosecutors trained on elder abuse, I don’t
know that they recognize this is a criminal behavior,” said Uekert.
“Sometimes
in the law enforcement arena, and we’re really working on this, it
tends to be discarded as a family issue,” said Julie Schoen, deputy
director of the
National Center on Elder Abuse (NCEA).
“Or, they perceive that maybe the older adult has some sort of
cognitive impairment, or they honestly don’t take it seriously.”
“The
piece that I am particularly concerned about is when there is a legal
document such as a Power of Attorney, or court-ordered guardianship or
conservatorship,” said Uekert. “Very often somebody shows that to law
enforcement, or prosecution, and they say ‘well, you’ve got this civil
arrangement, so this must be a civil problem.’ And that’s one of the
challenges I think that we still need to overcome.
“Just because this document exists, doesn’t give that person the [right] to take out $50,000 and buy himself a boat.”
Once
an elderly person has given money to a criminal in an IRS, lotto, or
‘grandparent’ scam, police often say there isn’t much they can do, said
Schoen, “They don’t [treat] it like a property crime or a theft.”
Patrick
Lamb, Assistant D.A. of Jefferson County, Alabama, said he was “quite
certain” that the majority of such crimes in his county never made it to
his office, even though he heads a white-collar crime unit that focuses
on public corruption, fraud, and elder exploitation.
“I find that frustrating,” he said.
Since
it was formed in 2014, the Jefferson County unit has focused on cases
where a family member abuses Power of Attorney to take money from an
older relative. In one recent case recounted by Lamb, a man abandoned
his aunt in a nursing home and cleaned out her accounts, leaving no
money left for her care.
But cases of third-party theft, where an
older person is victimized by scams over the Internet, mail, or
telephone, are not making it to the Jefferson County DA’s office.
“Even
when it’s reported, if it’s at all complex, it’s not investigated,”
said Lamb. “If the elderly are taken advantage of by an email, then once
they’ve sent the money, what are the police supposed to do?”
He
added: “If you’re a Birmingham police detective and you get 20 calls of
elder exploitation, they’re all going to the white collar unit, and
they’ll have a stack of police reports to follow up on. And if the first
one is ‘niece took $500,000 out of her retirement account,’ that’s one
where there’s something you can do: you can go talk to the complainant,
[and] you can look at the bank account.
“But if the next one is
‘somebody called me and said my grandson was in jail in Georgia, and I
needed to transfer $200,000 to get him out of jail,’ there’s nothing to
follow up on.”
A scam like this “may be more clearly criminal than
a caregiver or a family member,” said Lamb, but “you don’t have a
person to charge or to investigate or to hold accountable.”
Resources vary throughout the country, and so do attitudes about the roles of law enforcement and prosecutors.
The
Jefferson County D.A.’s office has one investigator for all white
collar crimes, and adheres to a more conventional procedural chain. If
police never find a suspect, the case never makes it to the D.A’s
office.
In contrast, the San Diego D.A.’s Elder Abuse Unit has
three prosecutors, four investigators, and actively seeks out cases of
suspected fraud.
Greenwood realizes that “most prosecutors around
the country don’t see it as their role to rattle the cage and go look
for cases,” he said.
Last year, one of Greenwood’s investigators
even worked full time on a local ‘grandma scam,’ tracing the money all
the way back to India through prepaid Walmart and Green Dot cards.
Twenty
years ago, when Greenwood’s Elder Abuse Unit was first formed, former
Chief of Police David Bejarano also created a special unit within the
San Diego Police Department to deal with elder crime.
These
combined resources within the DA’s office, law enforcement and state
legislature have made San Diego one of the country’s leading counties
for prosecuting elder fraud.
Needed: A ‘Cultural Shift’
Based
on what prosecutors and national elder advocates are saying, it will
take nothing less than a complete cultural shift within the criminal
justice system to protect older Americans.
“It’s very good to have
a case brought to you all tied up in a bow where we’ve got the
defendant, we’ve got the fingerprints, we’ve got the confession,” Loewy
told
The Crime Report.
“But these cases in particular
require investigation, they require extra work—because many of the
victims won’t come forward to talk about what happened, or they don’t
even realize that they’ve been defrauded.”
Greenwood, whom the NCEA called “the DA we all wish we had,” believes prosecutors need to change their traditional role:
“Most
prosecutors are trained to be reactive,” he said. “With elder financial
abuse we have to be far more proactive— so we have to talk to the
banks, the credit unions, we have to talk to adult relatives, neighbors,
mail carriers, and obviously the police departments to say ‘what are
you seeing? what are you hearing? and what’s being done about it?’”
Full Article & Source:
Fighting fraud against the elderly
