Sacramento Police destroyed rape kits, left others untested until a city audit | Opinion

Rape is a joke in America. I know this, because if it weren’t, allegations would be taken seriously, sex offenders would be prosecuted accordingly and survivors would have justice for the physically and mentally traumatic events that were entirely out of their control.

Instead, survivors wait years or sometimes decades for justice — if they ever see it at all — and offenders walk free, while hard evidence that could put them in jail sits untested or tossed out. The Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network estimates that for every 1,000 rapes, only 384 are reported to police, 57 of those result in an arrest, 11 are referred for prosecution, seven result in a felony conviction and just six result in the incarceration of the perpetrator.

There is no clearer example of this nation’s insincerity regarding rape and sexual assault allegations than the backlog of tens of thousands of untested rape kits (also known as sexual assault evidence kits) that sit shelved in police departments across the country.

The city of Sacramento is no exception.

Sacramento’s hundreds of untested kits

Last week, the Sacramento Police Department and an independent auditor’s office finally produced the results of a months-long investigation into the city’s backlog. Sac PD reported collecting more than 3,000 kits between 1979 to 2021.

Of those, 841 kits collected between those four decades had already been disposed of based on statutes of limitations, disposal schedules and completed investigations. ”We did not conduct any testing to assess the appropriateness of the disposal of these kits,” wrote the auditor.

Why is it important to test every kit? Because “by testing every (sexual assault evidence) kit connected to a reported crime, more DNA profiles will be developed and uploaded to these databases, meaning more DNA from crime scenes will be linked, identifying perpetrators of sexual violence and other crimes,” wrote the auditor in their report to the city.

“For example, according to the National Institute of Justice, testing previously untested kits in Detroit, Mich., assisted law enforcement to identify more than 400 serial rapists.”

The only reason Sacramento Police submitted themselves to an audit now was because they were legally forced to, thanks to a slew of state bills passed in 2018 and 2019, specifically Assembly Bill 3118 and Senate Bill 22, which address the investigation and processing of evidence related to sexual assault kits.

Before this audit, there were an estimated 340 kits in the department that remained untested. Now there’s about 120 left, the police reported to the city council last week. They blamed their negligence on the cost of testing, which can e upward of $1,000, and the lack of staffing, a favorite fallback despite its $228 million budget — an all-time high.

An ongoing problem

“The fear of sexual assault against women, including myself, is something we face daily. I think about my appearance and surroundings constantly,” Sacramento City councilwoman Karina Talamantes told me. “The culture of our society has been unjustly male-centric because for so long, leadership has been predominantly male. It’s my job as Mayor Pro Tem and as a woman to demand better and (to demand) justice for these survivors.”

As a woman in America, I know that if I were sexually assaulted or raped, my chance of justice is extremely small. I have little to no faith in law enforcement or the court system to find the perpetrator, much less punish them. And that’s not because of personal bias, it’s because the statistics of either outcome are impossibly small: Less than 1% of sexual assaults ever lead to a conviction.

Every 68 seconds, someone is sexually assaulted in America. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than half of women and almost one in three men have experienced sexual violence involving physical contact during their lifetimes, while a quarter of women have experienced rape or a rape attempt. Only 310 out of every 1,000 sexual assaults are reported to police according to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network; the top reasons being that survivors either feared retaliation, believed it was a personal matter, or that the police would not do anything to help.

Giving survivors the courtesy of testing their kit is the least we can do after they undergo an intrusive, medical forensic examination that often lasts between four and six hours, to collect evidence left behind in the assault.

Survivors expect that their rape kits will be tested, and the public expects the same. Any neglect by law enforcement is shameful and a dereliction of the duty they owe to the public they supposedly serve.

You’d think that with Chief Lester in charge — the city’s first female police chief — issues of sexual assault and rape, two terrible crimes that disproportionately affect women, would be handled with greater care than in the past. But clearly, no matter the gender of the top cop, the attitude among law enforcement regarding these terrible, traumatic crimes remains beyond callous toward women.