Category Archives: Backlogs

You don’t matter.
That’s the message every survivor hears loud and clear when a rape kit goes untested. Behind every kit is a person ― usually a woman ― who has been brutalized in the most intimate of ways. And yet there are estimated to be hundreds of thousands of untested rape kits currently sitting in police storage across the country.
So, how did we get here?
That’s the question actress and activist Mariska Hargitay answers in her new HBO documentary “I Am Evidence,” set to air April 16.

Police have worked through a chunk of untested rape kits in less than a year since state legislators passed a law to address a massive backlog.
According to data submitted Tuesday by the Metropolitan Police Department to lawmakers, 4,750 sexual assault kits in Southern Nevada remain untested. That is down from 6,473 untested kits as of December 2014 — the most recent figure available.

In Albuquerque, New Mexico, thousands of untested rape kits have never been sent for DNA analysis—a process that could, in some cases, lead to the identification of sex offenders and the discovery of serial rapists. Now, Mayor Tim Keller has signed an executive order asking Albuquerque to devise a plan to end its rape kit backlog.

The Wisconsin Department of Justice is contracting with two more private labs to analyze untested sexual assault kits.

A milestone for Maryland’s DNA database. It has now recorded 6,000 positive comparisons or hits.
Earlier this month, scientists at the Maryland State Police Forensics Science Division forwarded information to detectives that the 6,000th positive DNA comparison through the use of Maryland’s DNA database was connected to an open 2012 robbery.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) – Nearly 5,600 previously unprocessed sexual assault kits have now been tested, according to new statistics released by the attorney general’s office.
These recently processed kits have resulted in nearly 1,400 hits in a federal DNA database. Prior to a 2016 law, Florida had not required rape kits to be tested.

Wisconsin’s top prosecutor is addressing delays in clearing a backlog of thousands of untested rape kits.
The Department of Justice received a $2 million federal grant in 2015 to test 6,386 rape kits from sexual assault cases that had been left untouched. In some cases, the kits had been in police evidence lockers and hospitals for decades after not being processed for a variety of reasons, such as the crime being solved without the use of DNA evidence.

The Wisconsin Department of Justice announced a new website last month to keep the public informed on the number of untested sexual assault kits, otherwise known as “rape kits.”
Currently there are 6,391 previously untested kits, 4,067 kits of which are designated for testing.

(COLUMBUS, Ohio)— Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine announced that more than 13,000 sexual assault kits have now been analyzed as part of a special Attorney General’s Office initiative to test thousands of previously untested rape kits in the state of Ohio.
Nearly 300 local law enforcement agencies submitted a total of 13,931 sexual assault kits for analysis as part of Attorney General DeWine’s Sexual Assault Kit (SAK) Testing Initiative. As of October 1, 2017, 13,145 of the submitted kits – or 94 percent – have been tested by forensic scientists with the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI).

The Iowa Attorney General’s Office said that 95 out of more than 4,200 untested sexual assault kits that have been sitting in evidence in law enforcement agencies across the state have been sent for testing as of Friday.

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – The State Attorney’s Office and the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office are getting results from rape kits that were left untested for years.
About a year and a half ago, there was a big push to test DNA evidence that had stacked up for decades. More than 1,400 untested rape kits were sent to the lab from the Northeast Florida area.
The results are being put into a national database to see if a suspect can be identified by tracing DNA — and it’s working.