Untested sexual assault kits at the Los Angeles Police Department storage facility. © Patrica Williams 2009.
Take a moment to consider these facts, and try to comprehend the gravity of the problem of sexual assault in America:
1 in 6 American women have survived a rape or an attempted rape in their lifetime
1 in 33 American men have survived a rape or an attempted rape in their lifetime
Every two minutes, someone in the U.S is sexually assaulted
60 percent of sexual assaults, including rape, are not reported to the police
If a rape is reported, there is only a 50.8 percent chance of arrest
Factoring in unreported rapes, only 6 percent of rapists ever spend any time in jail
For the 40 percent of rape survivors who choose to report the crime against them, a long, frustrating, and often unsuccessful process follows. The victims first endure a 4 to 6 hour procedure, including a full-body examination, photographs of all visible physical injuries and body cavities, and swabs of every part of the body where ultraviolet light reveals DNA evidence. All these samples are placed in large white envelopes, and these “rape kits” are handed over to the police.
The ostensible next step would be to test these rape kits for DNA and other evidence that could lead to the arrest and conviction of a rapist. But in most large cities across the United States these rape kits rarely make it out of storage facilities and remain untested. San Antonio has 5,191 untested rape kits in storage; Houston has 3,846; Albuquerque has 1,116; and Detroit has somewhere between 5,800 and 10,000. A Human Rights Watch report from March spawned this count of stored rape kits across the country after highlighting Los Angeles’ failure to test an astonishing 12,699 rape kits.
Why aren’t these rape kits being tested? In the HRW report, no police chief or city official offered an excuse that justified leaving thousands and thousands of rape kits unattended. “We can only do so much with the resources we have,” said Greg Matheson, the Criminalistics Lab director for the City of Los Angeles police. That excuse is hardly sufficient when the 2004 Debbie Smith Act provides federal funds for state and local law enforcement entities to test DNA evidence—with rape kits specifically in mind.
A Los Angeles police officer offered another excuse to Human Rights Watch staff and this “justification” is just as fallacious as the previous one. The officer assumed some rape survivors just lie about what happened. Less than 2 percent of reported rape cases are false accusations, yet this unnamed officer exemplifies the erroneous belief that this percentage is much higher: “I am also not going to submit a kit when I don’t think the case is founded, where something about the victim’s story just doesn’t add up. As you know, some people report a rape to get back at their boyfriend, or to hide from their parents that they were having sex with their boyfriend, or all sorts of reasons. So, you don’t just test every rape kit that comes to you.”
The California State Assembly recently tried to address this problem with Assembly Bill 1017, which would require all local law enforcement agencies in the state to report to the Department of Justice the total number of rape kits in their possession that have not been tested or analyzed. This would at least give the state an idea of the scale of this problem. The bill easily flowed through both houses of the state legislature but stopped at Governor Schwarzenegger’s desk.
While the Governor made sure to say that he “strongly support[s] efforts to ensure that rape kits are analyzed and processed in a timely manner in order to identify and prosecute sex offenders,” he vetoed the bill because he claimed it required too much time, money, and effort on the part of police departments and the Department of Justice.
The U.S Senate has recently recognized that police departments like Los Angeles’ cannot be trusted to prioritize rape kit testing, and neither can state governments. As a result, Senators Al Franken (D-MN), Charles Grassley (R-IA), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), and Orrin Hatch (R-UT) have proposed the Justice for Survivors of Sexual Assault Act of 2009. The act, which has been referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee, would require the federal government to collect all untested rape kits and prioritize their testing in federal DNA funding programs, including those highlighted by the 2004 Debbie Smith Act.
Every major city in the United States will need the approval of this law to set fire to their feet on this issue—all, except New York City. The NYPD discovered their rape kit backlog problem way back in 1999 (and it was a BIG problem, with 16,000 untested kits) and vowed to have every one tested by 2003, as well as to immediately send every new rape kit to the crime lab for testing. Since 2003, the rape arrest rate in NYC has risen from 40 percent to 70 percent with the help of every rape kit being tested within 30-60 days of its collection. These figures prove that the backlog problem can be solved, and show that Los Angeles, along with every other city, county and state with a backlog of rape kits, needs to stop making excuses and make rape kit testing a priority.
