Michigan State University to Study Rape Kit Backlog

Michican State University is going to study how long/how much, it will take to clear out Michigan’s rape kit backlog.

A Michigan State University study may hold the key to pro­cess­ing 10,500 rape evi­dence kits never ana­lyzed by the now-defunct Detroit Police crime lab­o­ra­tory and could lead to pros­e­cu­tion of hun­dreds, pos­si­bly thou­sands, of rapists.

Under a new ini­tia­tive to be funded by the Michigan State Police, 400 ran­domly selected rape kits will be ana­lyzed by pri­vate labs. That data will then be ana­lyzed at MSU to deter­mine how long it may take to clear the other 10,100 reported sex­ual assault cases, includ­ing lab work and pros­e­cu­tion costs, said Michael Thomas, for­mer head of the State Police foren­sic labs. The State Police labs process rape kits for more than 600 law enforce­ment agen­cies across Michigan, includ­ing Detroit.

A pre­vi­ous esti­mate of out­sourc­ing such work to pri­vate com­pa­nies cal­cu­lated it would take 2 1/2 years and $15 mil­lion to com­plete the back­log of rape cases, some dat­ing into the mid-1990s.

“The objec­tive of the study is to estab­lish a time­line for the old cases to be com­pleted and iden­tify poten­tial costs,” said Thomas, who retired last month after 32 years with the State Police.

“Each of these unprocessed rape kits rep­re­sents a vic­tim who prob­a­bly has felt their case was being inves­ti­gated or couldn’t be solved. We want to bring them all justice.”

Read more in The Detroit News.