KANSAS CITY, Kan. (AP) — Leaders of a Kansas county have pledged to find funding to help the local prosecutor's office search through decades of records connected to a former police detective who is accused of abusing Black women and girls.
The Unified Government Commission voted Thursday to commit $1.7 million to digitize boxes of files related to former Kansas City police detective Roger Golubski.
Golubski is accused in two federal indictments of sexually harassing and raping Black females for years while he was a law enforcement officer, and of taking bribes and providing protection to a sex trafficking operation in the 1990s.
Wyandotte County District Attorney Mark Dupree told the commission that boxes of files, most of them on paper, are currently stored in an old jail and are not organized or searchable, The Kansas City Star reported.
Golubski was a law enforcement officer in Kansas City, Kansas, from 1975 until 2010 and in Edwardsville, which is also in Wyandotte County, until 2016.
The commission, which is prevented by law from allocating funds without specifying their source, voted to provide the money but still must identify funding sources.
Golubski, 69, has been on home detention since being indicted in September on six federal charges accusing him of assaulting a Black woman and girl, with prosecutors saying he also abused seven other women.
On Monday, Golubski was charged in a separate federal indictment with providing police protection to three other men who prosecutors allege ran a sex trafficking operation involving young girls between 1996 and 1998. He has pleaded not guilty to charges in both cases.
Civil rights groups in the Kansas City, Kansas, area for years called for an investigation into Golubski. The allegations against him gained attention after Lamonte McIntyre, who spent 23 years in prison for a double murder he didn’t commit, sued Golubski and other Kansas City, Kansas, officers.
McIntyre and his mother, Rose McIntyre, alleged that Golubski framed Lamont in 1994 because his mother refused the detective’s sexual demands.
The local government agreed in June to settle the lawsuit for $12.5 million.
