There has been a flurry of stories about the national backlog of rape kits around the country.
A government report released Tuesday found that essential DNA evidence in rape cases is often never sent to crime labs for testing. But what our investigation also found is that even when police departments do send rape kits to crime labs, they can go untested for months — even years — while rapists go free.
While not an excuse, a rape kit isn’t a simple single item of evidence labs are being too lazy to process. From my own personal experience dealing with crime labs around the country, the number of items in a rape kit varies from state to state considerably. But let’s take twelve items as an average number. Each one of those items might be broken down into even more sub-items later.
The story certainly underscore the need for more labs around the country to obtain funding, not only for more staff, but also new ways to automate the process to increase through put. In the meantime, the solution isn’t to immediately hire additional staff and expect that to solve the problem. The addition of new staff, after years of training, will only increase the amount of cases a lab can handle. The solution to eliminate backlogs is to send cases out to private laboratories, who have trained, accredited staff, and are ready to process cases immediately.
Read the entire CBS news story.
