County law-enforcement officials raided the police department in Harvey, Illinois -- where they found more than 200 rape kits that had never been sent to the state crime lab to be processed. (via Kate.)
"During the raid, investigators also videotaped the Harvey evidence vault, which revealed approximately 200 rape kits, many of which were never processed by the Illinois State Police Crime Lab at that point," Milan said. "In the spring of 2007, the Cook County state's attorney's office sex-crimes unit secured these kits and began having them tested by the [state] crime lab. One of those cold-case rapes had been charged since then."John Gorman, spokesman for the state's attorney's office, said about one quarter of the cases were sent out for testing. "We went through and got about 50 cases where we thought we might have DNA in the rape kits," he said. "The other 150 or so kits were cases in which the offense would not have been a DNA-type offense or where the victim refused to cooperate."
Police not having the staff or funds to actually process rape kits has long been a huge issue, with hundreds of thousands of kits just sitting in storage awaiting testing. It got a lot of media play several years ago, when Congress considered legislation to fund rape kit testing. From what I can tell, the groups dedicated to drawing attention to this issue have not been active since 2003. Does anyone know what's going on with the rape kit backlog these days? The Harvey story shows it's obviously still a problem.
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This breaks my heart and makes me shout in outrage what can I do to help.
i really wish i knew what happened - i remember the big push around this issue a few years back. and it certainly hasn't disappeared. like any other non-profit movement, my guess is not enough people out there are passionate about catching rapists to give their time, money, and effort to the cause.
shocking, right?
it was just incredibly depressing reading that article. what a slap in the face to so many victims.
Makes no sense.
Rape kits are value neutral. they're one of the few ways in which we can enhance accuracy of the process without adding a bi of bias: they help to convict the guilty AND they help to free the innocent. They're sort of like better investigators: they enhance the truth.
Everyone should be in favor of rape kits, whether you're an MRA or a full blown radfem.
Sigh.
sounds familiar... albeit not on as large a scale. this is where i live:
http://www.citizen-times.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=200770607001&theme=SHERIFFAUDIT
watching this on the news, so far as i can tell the police in harvey were sitting around doing nothing about much of anything, and it doesnt seem to have anything to do with funding, but i imagine it might have something to do with harvey being a poor community of mostly people of color. sort of like the stuff going on in gary indiana with this case http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-070926gary-story,0,6823818.story?coll=chi-news-hed
while its fucking absurd all these rape kits were just sitting around, i think its even more ludicrous that there is no justice in this country for POC at all.
From oprah.com:
Howard Safir explains, "For the price of one B-1 Bomber we could [test] all of the rape kits and convicted offenders." By law convicted rapists are supposed to have their DNA samples analyzed. Each analysis costs $50 and is entered into the national database. This helps in the conviction process using rape kits. One million of these samples are sitting out there unanalyzed.
Huh, so we could obey or own laws or be better at killing non-combatants in third world countries. I guess that's not a hard decision.
Since the most common defense to rape isn't "I didn't do it" but "she consented," the rape kit frequently doesn't contain any necessary information: the defendant has already admitted that it's his DNA; the court doesn't need to confirm it with an expensive lab test.
-- ACS
Andreas, that's true to an extent. However, rape kits can often confirm or disprove details of survivors' and alleged rapists' accounts of events. For example, someone can claim to have had consensual intercourse with a person, but deny or omit having had oral sex -- a positive oral swab impeaches such testimony. Similarly, such statements as "no, I didn't bite her," etc. can be disproved by rape kits. Rape kits also include examiners' descriptions of lacerations & bruises which can support a survivor's claim of nonconsensual sexual activity, and be inconsistent with a rapist's account of consensual lovemaking. The tests are worth doing, even if a suspect admits to having had sexual contact with the accuser.
-- ACS
(I realize that the last couple things I've posted here have basically been cop apologism. But don't take it that way--there are huge problems in the way rape is investigated. This, however, isn't necessarily one.)