Catch and release through the court system: Toilolo nabbed again

By
Suzanne Downing
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5
More than 150 cars have been reported stolen in Anchorage since Jan. 1, 2018. This map shows where those reports came from.

Saliloimanatu Toilolo is back on the street again, released by a court order this week.

On Oct. 26, she was apprehended by Anchorage police in a stolen silver 2003 Cadillac Escalade in the 1300 block of West 44th Avenue in Anchorage. The vehicle had been sought by officers for weeks.

On pursuit, the SUV sped off in the direction of Midtown. Shane Muse, the driver, drove recklessly throughout the Midtown area and police Officers located the vehicle in the 900 block of East 20th Avenue. But the driver took off again.

Police attempted to block the SUV and the driver, Shane Muse,  rammed the police vehicles in an attempt to evade arrest. Officers arrested driver Muse, 28, and passengers Crystal Tui, 24 and Saliloimanatu Toilolo, 32. They faced multiple charges including vehicle theft 1 and vehicle theft 2.

Toilolo soon was out and back to her old ways. So was driver Muse — released by the judge after being charged with numerous Class C felonies in this case and prior felony charges relating to an arrest a month earlier.

Last week Toilolo was arrested again after being spotted driving a blue 2009 Honda CRV. She was speeding west on Mountain View Drive, when police activated their patrol car lights to stop her. She slowed down, but then sped off again and  tried to outrun the police. While turning onto Concrete Street, the Honda slid into a wall and Toilolo was arrested.

As it turns out, that car had been stolen during a residential burglary on New Year’s Eve in south Anchorage.

But the license plate came from a different car: a Chevy Tahoe that was stolen before Thanksgiving in west Anchorage.

Toilolo was charged in January with first-degree vehicle theft and failing to stop at the direction of an officer, and she was booked.

Anchorage police labeled her a repeat-offender.

But according to state records, she has since been released until her court hearing next week.
Toilolo had been through the Department of Corrections’ new risk assessment process, part of the SB 91 criminal justice reform law passed two years ago that has created a catch-and-release system meant to keep prison population down and keep basically good people from becoming hardened criminals by associating with other hardened criminals in jail.
In practice, the risk assessment matrix scores the defendants on a scale of 1 to 10 on the likelihood of reoffending. And yet, only a score of 10 keeps them in jail.
We don’t know what score Toilolu was given (although that’s discoverable in her file), but it was apparently between 1 and 9.
Pro tip: Keep your car locked, just in case the pre-trial assessment tool was wrong.

5 COMMENTS

  1. Keep her in jail. How hard is this? Come up with a legal definition of common sense and put it in all the laws.

  2. It’s not just Alaska, ever watch bait car? i saw a recent episode where the guy stole the baitcar and he had 27 felony arrests…..why was he out?

  3. Thank you very much for reporting on this – we need more detailed follow up like this. Part of the reason SB91 got passed was inadequate public understanding, partly due to vague and misleading reporting that failed to identify the radical extremes in the bill, and the falsehoods and faulty “data” and “research” used to justify it. Please keep following up on the actual costs of this new pretrial unit and the scoring methods they are using to make release decisions. Also please look into whether they even run fingerprints to positively ID defendants and run a national criminal history check on them before they make decisions to release them. Keep up the good work!

  4. I used to advise my political principals that they could be assured of the support of the correctional officers if they assured them they’d never have a social worker as commissioner and the support of the Troopers by assuring them that they’d never have an academic as commissioner. SB 91 is the product of academics and that’s all you need to know.

    I was once brought into a Majority caucus to explain some amendments to a complex bill that had been dumped on us at the last moment. One senator asked why I was there, because non-members are rarely in Caucus meetings. He was told I was there to go over the amendments with them. He replied that he didn’t need to know what the amendments were about; all he needed to know was the name of the sponsor. Just seeing who was behind SB 91 should have been all it took to keep any Republican from voting for it.

  5. I worked in Corrections & Law Enforcement for about 28 years. I used to have to complete risk assessments all the time. They tend to be more concerned with violent/sex crimes vs property crimes when it comes to pre-trial release never mind that the majority of crimes that effect the public are theft related. In my opinion they are built on an agenda to support release for property criminals vs violent criminals. This dispite the fact that they overlap all the time. I did them because it was required but tried to base recommendations on common sense based on previous criminal acts or other obvious issues. I was not always popular with burocratic management but respected by the judges, police, victims & most attornies. And even criminals too who thought I was fair. Depending on risk assessments is more of a crutch to protect burocratic/political decisions.

    Dave

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