In July of this year 70,000 rape kits that have never been tested were identified from records from around 1,000 different police departments. As astonishing as that is, it doesn't even cover the whole scope of the situation seeing as there are roughly 18,000 police departments in the US (Reilly, par. 4). Imagine, if there are 70,000 untested rape kits for every 1,000 police departments, then there are, potentially, 1,260,000 untested rape kits out there. It's mindboggling on how, what people call the rape kit backlog, has gotten so large. For those that do not know, a rape kit, is the container of evidence that is collected from a victim of a sexual assault, that is used to help find the perpetrator of the crime. The backlog is the kits that
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This could be beneficial because, in the USA Today article written by Steve Reilly, it costs roughly $1,000 to test just one rape kit (Reilly, par. 22). So it will take a rather large sum of money to be able to test all of the untested kits. Thankfully, in 2004 "the federal government provided extra funding via the Debbie Smith Act" (Hamzelou, par.2) and in Memphis they "launched a 6.5 million project to have its backlogged evidence processed by a private lab" (Hamzelou, par. 4). While these may not give enough to test all of the kits in America, they will be helpful. These acts are not the only ones that we have in America at this point. In fact "Congress appropriated about $1.2 billion to cut the nation's backlog of DNA testing" and then, in 2013, they "passed the Sexual Assault Forensic Evidence Reporting Act" (Reilly, par. 26). This act stated that "three quarters of federal funding for sexual assault kits be used for testing or taking inventory" (Reilly, par. 26). The law was made so that grants would be provided to police departments to help them with any cost that go along with fixing the backlogs. Except, so far, "no grants have been awarded" (Reilly, par. 26). Essentially, they passed a law that wasn't actually acted upon. Their intentions were good, but more needs to be done before there will be any true impact on the
This could be beneficial because, in the USA Today article written by Steve Reilly, it costs roughly $1,000 to test just one rape kit (Reilly, par. 22). So it will take a rather large sum of money to be able to test all of the untested kits. Thankfully, in 2004 "the federal government provided extra funding via the Debbie Smith Act" (Hamzelou, par.2) and in Memphis they "launched a 6.5 million project to have its backlogged evidence processed by a private lab" (Hamzelou, par. 4). While these may not give enough to test all of the kits in America, they will be helpful. These acts are not the only ones that we have in America at this point. In fact "Congress appropriated about $1.2 billion to cut the nation's backlog of DNA testing" and then, in 2013, they "passed the Sexual Assault Forensic Evidence Reporting Act" (Reilly, par. 26). This act stated that "three quarters of federal funding for sexual assault kits be used for testing or taking inventory" (Reilly, par. 26). The law was made so that grants would be provided to police departments to help them with any cost that go along with fixing the backlogs. Except, so far, "no grants have been awarded" (Reilly, par. 26). Essentially, they passed a law that wasn't actually acted upon. Their intentions were good, but more needs to be done before there will be any true impact on the