Wait, you mean you actually have to PROCESS them?

Who'd have known. (Shakes head.)

The general excuse for having rape kits go unprocessed is, "Well, we don't have enough money" and "We only process the ones where we think there's a good chance of conviction."

The former excuse, as noted, is bushwah. How many municipalities, even with partial grants, are busy arming up their regular cops and SWAT teams with ever-increasing paramilitary gear and vehicles.  You think that all is magically free?  

The second excuse is nearsighted in the extreme. Rape is rarely a one-off phenomenon. Even if you process a rape kit without garnering a conviction because of questions over consent, or because no perpetrator is ever caught, you also can start picking up patterns if you get multiple hits — which become high value targets to track down, better investigate, and prosecute, with extra effect in getting them off the street.  But you can only do that if you process the kits.

Yeah, it's great that we have this technology. That we aren't effectively using it is both tragic and, arguably, criminal.

Reshared post from +Yonatan Zunger

I find this story incredibly disturbing. WXYZ-Detroit is reporting that in 2009, the city found a stash of 11,000 (!) untested rape kits abandoned in a police storage facility. After testing only 1,600 of them, they've already identified 100 uncaptured serial rapists, plus ten more already in prison. And this problem isn't limited to Detroit — nationwide, it's estimated that there are 400,000 untested kits.

I'm sincerely, deeply, hoping that the rate of one serial rapist (defined as the same person perpetrating at least two rapes) per 14.5 rape kits, 91% of them still on the loose, doesn't hold up if all of these are tested, because that would imply that these untested kits alone contain evidence of over 27,000 serial rapists, 25,000 of which — equivalent to the entire population of Asheboro, NC — are still on the loose. 

To put it rather mildly, someone who is going around committing multiple rapes is not a nice guy. I would say, in fact, that such a person is a menace to all society, and is the sort of person that you would expect to be a rather high priority to stop. This makes it extremely alarming that there are 400,000 such kits which are backlogged, largely because local police departments don't have the resources to have them tested. 

If we're going to be investing large sums of money in our police departments, this seems like it would be a good place to put those resources. I'm thinking about the rather spectacular amount of money we're dumping into make-work exercises for police departments, like staffing up dedicated SWAT teams in towns too small to have any use for them, or the grants for "terrorism preparedness" ($1.5B in FY2013) which the DHS is giving to local police departments. 

I mean, let's say you're going to use the fear of movie-plot threats ("What if they blow up the White House?!") as your way to make funding decisions. This is a stupid way to make your decisions for hopefully obvious reasons, but let's say you do it anyway. Can you think of any terror plot in the past twenty years which would be remotely as alarming as "Let's secretly release 25,000 serial rapists onto the streets of the United States?" I mean, that's a plot which would even stretch Hollywood credibility. I would be hard-pressed to think of a more alarming sort of plot, if someone could pull it off.

Yet it appears that we have that many people on the loose for which we have actual evidence to catch them, just sitting around in back rooms.

I want you to imagine the hero of your favorite terrorism movie or police procedural or whatever investigating the US being secretly infiltrated by tens of thousands of serial rapists, roaming the streets of our towns and cities. And then I want you to imagine the look on his face when he finds out that the evidence needed to identify them was already taken and is being kept in storage because of bureaucracy and stupidity.

Now imagine that this is actually going on, and this half-baked movie plot appears to accurately describe a live threat we are dealing with. 

You can, apparently, stop imagining. Perhaps it's time to actually fix the goddamned problem?

h/t +Kee Hinckley and +Xeno Phrenia for the link.