Try to imagine an estimated 200,000 DNA rape kits piling up for years on end, sitting ignored and forgotten in law enforcement storage areas across this nation.
Now consider Florida's particular embarrassment: Here, the number of unprocessed rape kits is officially more than 13,000. But, as bad as that sounds, the number probably is many thousands more than that. How do we know? Because when the Florida Department of Law Enforcement tried to catalog its rape kit backlog in a four-month survey, about 31 percent of Florida police departments did not respond.
Think about that for a moment.
Thirty-one percent of the police departments in the state either don't know how many untested rape kits they have, can't count that high, or don't think they have to answer to FDLE.
Whichever it is, it only proves Gov. Rick Scott, Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi and Sen. Joe Negron, R-Stuart, are all on to a public safety scandal of vast proportions. They're pushing to do something about it.
I ask you: Besides rape, can you think of another crime where police have definitive evidence yet fail to process it?
Since the mid-1990s, law enforcement has had the ability to take forensic evidence from rape victims -- body fluids, stray hairs, fingernail scrapings -- and match the DNA findings to information stored in an FBI database called CODIS (for Combined DNA Index System).
The beauty of CODIS is this: When tested, that DNA evidence contained inside rape kits can be an incredibly powerful tool to solve and prevent crime. It can identify an unknown assailant and confirm the presence of a known suspect. It can affirm the survivor's account of the attack and discredit the suspect. It can connect the suspect to other crime scenes. It can exonerate innocent suspects.
Rapists rape repeatedly. They rarely, rarely have just a single victim. Nationwide, CODIS is credited with taking hundreds of rapists off the streets.
A story in the Huffington Post reported this: "One study on serial offenders puts the average number of a rapist's victims at seven while another study puts it at 11. To put this in perspective, realize that if we get just one of these perps off the street, we've prevented future crimes. Every year in America there are roughly 200,000 reported rapes, and it is not just women who are attacked. Ten percent of all rape victims are men."
Try to imagine what it's like for a victim to get a rape kit collected. The process can last up to four hours. It's like being violated for a second time, involves getting poked, prodded, swabbed and photographed in exactly the places a rape victim would have been violated in the attack. Now imagine that years go by, all that evidence goes nowhere. The statute of limitations expires, the victim's evidence never makes it to CODIS. The anguish of giving it went for naught.
In case you're wondering where the new impetus for rape kit testing came from: On Dec. 18, 2015, the president signed into law $45 million in funding for the U.S. Department of Justice’s community-based sexual assault response initiative in the FY16 omnibus bill. It was specifically to get rape kit testing under way nationwide.
Pardon me for asking, but now we know what we know, what the blue blazes are we waiting for? Lawmakers and police officials in every state cry poorhouse ... It's all a matter of money. If only there were more money. But I think that's a crock. Until now, rape kit processing -- rather, the lack of it -- hasn't been about money, it's been about prosecutors' priorities. It's been about indifference to the crime.
But the bottom line is, money shouldn't be the issue. Experts say the money spent on processing the rape kits would be far less than we would have to pay out to investigate and prosecute these rapists' future crimes.
FDLE has said it could take as long as 8.5 years and $32 million to handle just the 6,661 untested kits within its jurisdiction. That's too long. Way too long. In Florida, as covered in Florida Statute 794.011, the statute of limitations on a felony, which includes sexual battery (rape) is four years.
Without a processed rape test within four years, the perp takes a walk.
Negron is not in favor of the Legislature allowing the agency to outsource the testing -- even the backlog. He believes in the interest of public safety, rape kits should take priority over less critical cases. But if the agency did get the green light to outsource, FDLE has said it could eliminate the backlog within three years at a cost of $8.1 million.
I don't get it.
Everywhere I look, I discover a rape kit test should cost $1,500 each. But FDLE's estimate of $32 million to test 6,661 kits comes out at $2,233 per test. Even to outsource the backlog it's only $1,201. Do the math.
I'm on Negron's side on this one. If FDLE can't hire and retain enough lab technicians to process rape kits, why does anyone think this agency can hire and retain enough detectives and crime scene investigators to do the much more difficult and time-consuming work of, say, providing an extra layer of investigative juice for police-involved shootings?
Are the rape kits just the tip of an iceberg at FDLE?
Can't we hire the people we need, dedicate one group of lab technicians to examine the most recent kits so we can stop currently active rapists; then a second group to examine the oldest kits, with an eye on the ones that might come up against the statute of limitations? God knows, we don't need further delay. The information needs to go to CODIS yesterday -- this is about making our streets safer.
Thank you, state leaders, those of you who are making this a priority.
Reach Nancy Smith at nsmith@sunshinestatenews.com or at 228-282-2423. Twitter: @NancyLBSmith
