State pushes rape-kit testing bills to address backlog
evidence from previously untested rape kits. In 2014, when she first asked law enforcement agencies in Alameda County to inventory their untested rape kits, they found 1,900 stored in evidence rooms.
She said the final 200 rape kits will be sent soon to be tested. Now, she said, new rape kits are sent for testing within days.
“Because of this, we are starting to identify serial rapists,” O’Malley said.
O’Malley said that when a victim undergoes the lengthy and unpleasant exam needed to provide material for a rape kit — where blood, urine, fingernail clippings, hair and swabs from the mouth, genitals and anus are collected as evidence — they expect that evidence to be tested. She’s talked to victims who were angry that their rape kits weren’t tested for so long. She’s talked to victims whose rape could have been prevented if only an earlier case had been pursued.
“This is about justice and fairness for them,” O’Malley said.
But laws to strengthen requirements for handling rape kits have fallen short in California, often because of pressure from groups such as the California State Sheriffs’ Association. They argue that the state shouldn’t set new mandates without paying for the expenses that come with them.
In 2014 — facing opposition from crime labs and the sheriffs’ lobbyists — lawmakers watered down a bill that would have required police to submit rape-kit evidence to a crime lab within five days of collection, and require the lab to process and upload the evidence to national crime databases within 30 days. To get the bill to pass, then-Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner, DBerkeley, extended the timelines — 20 days for police to send the evidence to crime labs and 120 days for crime labs to process it — and made it a recommendationonly deadline. Gov. Jerry Brown signed the bill into law.
Advocates say the bill has helped, even if it fails to require such deadlines. They also praised the state for eliminating its 10-year statute of limitations last year on new sex crimes. But they say more changes are needed.
Lawmakers are considering three new bills. One would expand services to victims and ensure their evidence can’t be destroyed for 20
“We’ve counted a half dozen bills attempting to address the rape-kit backlog that have stalled, been vetoed or been watered down.” Assemblyman David Chiu, D-San Francisco
years. Another would ask taxpayers to contribute part of their state tax return to fund rape-kit testing.
And Assemblyman David Chiu, D-San Francisco, is trying for a second year to pass a bill to require law enforcement agencies to report how many rape kits they have collected and examined, then disclose why any kit is not being tested. AB41 applies only to new rape kits, and would not require agencies to do an inventory of their evidence rooms. A similar bill Chiu carried last year failed in a Senate fiscal committee, where AB41 is scheduled to be heard next month.
“My bill is part of a long line of failed bills over the past decade to address this issue,” Chiu said. “We’ve counted a half dozen bills attempting to address the rape-kit backlog that have stalled, been vetoed or been watered down.”
The only opposition to AB41 is the California State Sheriffs’ Association, whose lobbyist Cory Salzillo said the bill is yet another unfunded state mandate.
“For the sheriffs, this breaks down to a fiscal and workload issue,” Salzillo told lawmakers at a hearing last month.
District Attorney O’Malley brushed off those concerns, saying millions of dollars in grant money is available to help agencies offset the cost. Also, she said, “literally, this would mean a few more keystrokes to create this data.”
Last year, the San Francisco Police Commission required local police to publicly report twice a year how many rape kits they collect and send to labs, and how they notify victims about their case. The action followed criticism over the Police Department’s backlog of unprocessed rape kits and its failure to notify victims about the results when evidence was tested.
As part of the commission’s directive, the department also adopted a policy last year to send every rape kit to a lab within 24 hours. The crime lab averages 25 days to complete the cases, said department spokesman David Stevenson.
Two years ago, the Police Department reported having 437 rape kits that sat untested for more than a decade and were beyond the statute of limitations. Stevenson said last week that those have all been tested and the agency no longer has a backlog.