More agencies provide rape kit count

A number of law enforcement agencies have heeded a last-ditch, follow-up appeal to comply with a governor’s directive to audit their evidence rooms and report their number of untested rape kits, but close to 100 agencies still have not reported back.

Two weeks ago, with nearly 150 law enforcement agencies still not reporting, the Sexual Assault Forensic Evidence Task Force decided to ask the Oklahoma Sheriffs’ Association and the Oklahoma Association of Chiefs of Police to follow up with the nonresponsive agencies.

“That last push has really helped us out,” Melissa Blanton, chairwoman of the task force, said during a Thursday meeting in Oklahoma City.

Staff at the Oklahoma Attorney General’s Office are still working to tabulate the responses that have come in, Blanton said. So far, they’ve tallied 7,172 untested rape kits reported by 290 law enforcement agencies across the state. Those numbers will change as the information is updated, Blanton said.

“We’ve had a large response within the last week, and we haven’t been able to input that data,” she said.

One agency that reported back recently had about 44 untested kits, but a number of rural agencies reported zero untested kits, Blanton said.

Last April, Gov. Mary Fallin signed an executive order creating the task force to determine the number of untested rape kits statewide and make recommendations. Fallin directed law enforcement agencies to report the number of untested kits to the state attorney general’s office by December 2017 but later set a new deadline of Feb. 15 after many agencies missed the initial date.

Eight weeks have passed since that extended deadline.

Danielle Tudor, a member of the task force who is a rape survivor, made an impassioned plea Thursday for law enforcement agencies to comply with the audit directive if they have not already done so. Ignoring the governor’s executive order and repeated requests to comply is disrespectful to sexual assault victims, she said.

“It told me that my rape kit doesn’t matter,” Tudor said. “It showed me the bias that’s there for this crime and for this evidence because we would never take a gun or a knife and put it on an evidence shelf and never do anything with it.”

When Fallin announced the deadline extension earlier this year, she said agencies that failed to comply by that date would risk losing federal money that is administered by state agencies.

Last month, after the deadline passed, Michael McNutt, communications director for Fallin, said the governor’s office would “consider withholding certain funds” from law enforcement agencies that didn’t comply.

Asked again this week whether the noncomplying agencies would face consequences, McNutt said the governor’s office is evaluating the information compiled by the task force.

“The governor’s office will consider what action to take if noncompliant law enforcement agencies are to receive certain funds,” McNutt wrote in an email. “The point is not to punish law enforcement agencies, but to ensure that the task force is given the adequate data to perform its function.”

Members of the task force have started to work on other responsibilities assigned to them by the governor, which include identifying possible improvements in law enforcement training and identifying and pursuing grants and other funding sources “to eliminate the backlog of untested sexual assault forensic evidence kits.”

The task force has until July 1 to report findings and recommendations to the governor and state legislative leaders.

During Thursday’s meeting, the task force received an update about reasons reported by law enforcement agencies for why the untested kits weren’t tested. So far, some of the most common reasons have included “lack of victim cooperation” and the district attorney declined to file charges.

Members of the task force discussed the guidelines they should recommend related to the process of gathering and analyzing rape kits, but made no final recommendations yet.

Tudor spoke about the importance of testing rape kits and gave examples of other cities that have identified serial offenders when they submitted their untested rape kits for testing.

“The power of DNA is that when you put it into a database, you often make connections that you previously could not make,” she said. “Cases that didn’t seem strong became much stronger when that DNA linked to several other cases.”

A subcommittee is working to develop recommendations for best practice model for law enforcement when responding to sexual assaults.