I’ve written before about the huge backlog of untested rape kits currently in the possession of the LAPD, and more horrifying news about the problem has just come out. An audit has shown that the LAPD allowed the prosecution deadline to expire on more than 200 sexual assault cases without testing the rape kits.
Los Angeles police officials have allowed the deadline for prosecuting as many as 200 potential sexual assault cases to pass without testing DNA evidence that might have resulted in a suspect’s identification, according to a city audit released today.
The 200 cases were part of an overall backlog of 7,000 sexual assault test kits that have not been examined by the LAPD. Each kit contains a potential genetic road map to the perpetrator of a crime.
“Sometimes I find problems as city controller that simply defy explanation,” said City Controller Laura Chick at a news conference at which she unveiled her findings. “It is beyond disturbing that the thousands of victims who have undergone the invasive ordeal of [submitting to] these tests do not even know that their evidence is still untested.”
Worse yet, the excuses keep getting more and more transparent. Despite claims that a lack of funding is the issue here, it’s becoming apparent that this is more a case of lacking political will and/or severe incompetence.
The LAPD has been repeatedly criticized for its huge backlog of untested DNA evidence, but officials have said that they lacked the money to move faster on the cases.
Chick’s report, however, found that the logjam existed even though the department had received nearly $4 million in grants in recent years to address the problem.
According to the city audit, there are 217 rape kits that have sat on the shelves in LAPD property rooms that are beyond the 10-year statute in which to prosecute the crimes.
“They are totally useless and that number is growing every day,” Chick said.
Auditors also found that the LAPD was failing to comply with a state law that requires sexual assault victims to be notified by the police if their rape kits are not tested within a two- year period. If authorities had made those notifications the statute of limitations would have been extended. (emphasis mine)
How is this considered okay? Why is it being allowed to continue?
As the LA Times article notes, if you don’t live in LA, don’t get comfy. Their situation is far from unique; the U.S. Justice Department says that there are 169,000 untested rape kits nationwide. And this kind of negligence has horrendously grave consequences.
In Los Angeles County, the backlog has occasionally caused trial dates to be canceled, frustrated detectives, and delayed justice for victims and their families. In one case, an evidence kit that went untested for months left a suspected rapist free to allegedly assault another victim.
Disgusting, terrifying, and utterly indefensible.
This LA Times editorial is spot on:
The city’s inability or unwillingness to fund this necessary police work is a result of politics as well as resource limits. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, like his predecessors, has put a premium on increasing the number of officers on the street; when the department gets money, that’s often where it goes. Police Chief William J. Bratton also has focused on numbers.
This page too has urged the city to enlarge the department. Los Angeles remains the nation’s most underpoliced big city, and recent downward crime trends have come in spite of, and not because of, the unacceptably low officer-to-resident ratio. But there’s little point in having more officers, or arrests, if the department neglects the bedrock investigative and lab work necessary to solve crimes.
As I said last time, though many treat rape survivors who choose to not report and go through the trauma of rape kit collection as cowardly and misguided, their reasons are in fact very rational. Why should a woman report in a world that mocks and blames rape victims, when there’s not only a low chance she’ll see a conviction but apparently a good shot her kit won’t even be tested?
The reasons for not reporting make a lot of sense, but they shouldn’t. This nonsense needs to stop now.
[...] cross-posted at Feministe [...]
Yeah, the LAPD has a lot of problems like many agencies with women, both as victims (like in the case with the rape kits) and their own officers. This is the agency that hired an investigator to look into DV cases involving its own officers and the DV situation was so bad (and the LAPD didn’t even slap wrists) that the investigator spent time in jail on contempt charges b/c he leaked the information out to the media.
The LAPD is trying to fill its academy classes to get its numbers up first to 10,000 and then 12,000. They lost tons of officers when they underwent their federal consent decree beginning in 2001 (and it’s still ongoing b/c the judge keeps extending it for lack of compliance on some key items) which is typical for departments undergoing court-mandated reform processes. But equipment funding is being cut a lot in most agencies and more and more there’s reliance on grant funding which is being cut by deficits and the increased focus of grants on Homeland Security issues.
I think money plays a huge role but I think police culture plays a role as well. After all, some of those rapists and sex offenders are police officers including in the LAPD. My city just arrested one last week. A guy who I’d heard about two years before the offenses he was charged with. And sexual harassment in LE agencies including quid pro quo sexual harassment is very common. There’s a lack of respect for women as officers and even as community especially towards women of color, immigrant, transgendered women and/or lesbians (as has been written about here and other blogs many times). So I’m not surprised there’s not as much emphasis on rape kits. Don’t get me wrong. There’s rape detectives who care, in fact in my city some work overtime getting less to no pay b/c it’s not in the budget to have a rape/child abuse detective (though they got six hours of that back recently after an upset), but there’s still that police culture.
What a disgrace. If I were an LA taxpayer, I’d be outraged.
Frank
Rarely is the identity of the rapist in question, or whether or not there was sexual contact. A rape kit doesn’t answer questions about consent, which are what rape trials usually turn on.
A more likely defense than, “Who is that lady? I don’t know her.” is, “Oh sure I had sex with her and roughed her up a bit, but we were drunk and thought some rough sex would be fun.”
As someone who never came close to reporting being raped, I would tend to agree with the cynical “Why bother?” stance, though I didn’t have that sophisticated a reason at the time. I was in the self-blaming “How could I be so dumb? wtf was I thinking going out drinking with a strange man?” frame of mind for months, maybe years afterward.
[...] This is outrageous too! [...]
A good lab can get DNA evidence even from very old material, so long as it’s kept safely.
And as noted above, the issue with regard to some used rape kits is that the identity of the rapist is not in doubt – but conviction is so unlikely (because the victim was drunk, because she’d previously agreed to have sex with her rapist, because the victim is a sex worker, because…) that the police simply decide not to take the case to court. And if that’s the case and known to the lab to be the case, then I cannot actually say the lab are wrong not to test the rape kits.
These untested rape kits really are a concrete manifestation of the figures that rape trolls love to doubt: that most reported rapes don’t even reach court, let alone result in conviction.
(Or whoever it is makes the decision to move on the case. I don’t actually know that it’s the police: but it isn’t the victim’s decision whether or not to go to court: she’s the witness, not the prosecutor.)
…It’s not wrong for the lab to not test rape kits before the the statute of limitations expires because the police and prosecutors probably won’t do anything even if they have the evidence?
No.
It’s absolutely not okay for the failure to test a rape kit to be a factor that allows rapists to go unprosecuted. Those responsible for the testing of the rape kits have a duty to do so, to the victim/survivor and the public at large. They don’t get to use someone else’s incompetence or failure to act to excuse their own.
KJ, I was clearly not making myself clear enough.
In many instances of rape, the identity of the rapist is not in doubt – in particular, in the many instances where the rapist claims “It was consensual sex”. In those instances, where the rapist admits sex, says it was consensual, and the deciders reckon that their chances of obtaining a conviction are so low that they tell the victim they don’t think it’s worth taking the case to court – how is it wrong for labs to decide not to test the rape kits? In those cases of rape, the rape kit being tested or untested is irrelevant to whether the the rapist goes unprosecuted. Why ask the lab to spend resources on testing a kit when the results of the test will not affect the decision to go to court one way or another?
In case you missed it, I was not approving this state of affairs. Just that the problem in these instances is not the rape kits not being tested – that’s a symptom. The problem is the system that ensures many women who are raped do not stand a chance of seeing the rapist convicted. Of which, I think, this backlog of untested rape kits is concrete evidence.
A police officer in Illinois was just arrested/convicted? of 35 rapes. Rape is a crime committed by all social and economic groups.
I think the powers that be, are afraid to find out who the rapist among us are!
These rape kits, if tested and entered into a data base, create a DNA profile of rapist. Rapist don’t rape once! There may be five different detectives working on cases committed by the same person. If all rape kits were tested crimes would be solved, weak cases could add evidence to stronger cases.
Just test all kits in the country, and put the DNA evidence into one computer data base.