State and municipal governments across the US are setting aside millions to fund a renewed push to eliminate a shocking 250,000 backlog of untested rape kits, which contain DNA evidence collected from rape victims for processing after reporting their sexual assaults.
"Sexual assault survivors agree to the evidence collection expecting their kits to be tested," Charlene Reiss, who works with sexual assault and human trafficking victims at the Durham Crisis Response Center in Durham, North Carolina, told The News & Observer on May 24.
"As a system we need to respect and honor the courage of those survivors by testing all of their kits and keeping them informed at all stages of the process," she said.
Durham County's effort is part of a statewide push to get the evidence contained in 15,000 untested rape kits off of police station shelves and into crime labs, where they can be processed and possibly lead to prosecutions.
North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein said at a news conference last Thursday that "Durham is now the No. 2 city in the state of North Carolina in terms of moving kits off of the shelves, where they do us no good, and into the evidence analysis process, where we can eventually solve crimes."
Satana Deberry, Durham County's new district attorney, is helping lead the charge in prosecuting rape.
They're already achieving results. The News & Observer noted that several recently processed rape kits had reopened cold cases in North Carolina, and even led to arrests.
However, money is a huge factor in the creation of the backlog: North Carolina's State Crime Lab recently received a $3 million grant to help cover the backlog reduction, but Stein says another $6 million are needed from the state legislature in order to complete the job.
"The examination and evidence collection take many hours," Reiss told the News & Observer. "It is uncomfortable, and it is invasive. It takes courage to submit one's body to that process and to tell the story of one's assault to a stranger."
It's a story being replicated in districts across the country.
In Arizona's Maricopa County, which contains roughly half of the state's population, the Maricopa County Attorney's Office is close to finishing processing its 4,500 untested rape kit backlog. Amanda Steele, a spokesperson for the attorney's office, told local radio station KTAR-FM on May 24 that 90% of the kits had been tested since processing began in 2015, with only 250 remaining. The office had received a $5.7 million grant to cover the costs, which have included hiring a detective and prosecutor dedicated to working on the cases that arise.
On May 2, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania's police department finished processing its 1,574 rape kit backlog. District Attorney Larry Krasner told NBC 10 they had already closed one previously unsolved rape case dating to 1999.
Now the Philadelphia Police Department has set a goal of processing rape kits within 90 days of the crime, Krasner said.
The Texas legislature approved a bill last week that would provide significant funding to eliminate that state's untested rape kit backlog as well as create new processes to promote the regular testing and reporting of new kits.
The bill, which Governor Greg Abbott is expected to sign, would provide the state's Department of Public Safety with a $50 million budget to process rape kits and would require the department to create a report of all untested kits. It would also create a statewide network of forensic examiner offices and sexual assault examiner offices.
"In Texas, we have thousands of rape kits sitting on shelves waiting to be tested. We have thousands of survivors waiting for justice," Rep. Victoria Neave told the House during debate, according to the Austin American-Statesman.
Mobile, Alabama's District Attorney's Office began processing a backlog in 2015 that included some kits dating back to 1979, NBC 15 reported Tuesday. All but 29 of the 1,600-kit backlog have been processed now, and Assistant District Attorney Tandice Hogan noted they had produced over a hundred connections to suspects or evidence from past criminal cases.
The Idaho State Police Crime Lab has also created a statewide system for victims who've submitted rape kits to track the status of their kit at any time.
"They just put their kit number into the system, into the website, and they'll be able to see what's happened with their kit," lab director Matthew Gamette told Seattle radio station KOMO News.
At the federal level, too, the FBI is clearing out its backlog. According to the Department of Justice website, as of Wednesday the bureau had processed 4,160 untested rape kits and identified another 6,838. AP reported that 1,495 kits had enough DNA in them to upload to the FBI's national database and that DNA from almost 500 matched profiles in that database, leading to charges against eight people so far.
Sinclair Broadcasting Group estimated that if the DNA of every untested rape kit were entered into a national database, it could help solve over 2 million crimes with unidentified DNA evidence.
