National Rape Kit News Stories

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.