Program to allow rape kit tracking
Victims of sexual assault in Harris County would be able to track their rape kits electronically under a pilot program unveiled by local officials Thursday.
The effort will be spearheaded by Harris County law enforcement, and give victims “the sense of power that is lost in their violent attacks,” Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said at a Thursday news conference.
The program will pilot software to be rolled out in Harris County in May and statewide in September. The software will allow survivors the ability to track their rape kits from evidence collection to prosecution. The pilot will include evidence collected in the Harris Health System and the Houston Forensic Science Center.
Emilee Whitehurst, president of the Houston Area Women’s Center, said rape testing often adds to the trauma of the small fraction of victims who come forward.
“Imagine getting evidence collected from your body,” she said. “Survivors should not have to endure further traumatic ordeals by struggling to get information about their cases or how their evidence is being used.”
For years, law enforcement officials across the country have faced criticism and lawsuits over backlogs of untested rape
kits, failures that sometimes had tragic consequences.
In Texas, outrage over rape kit backlogs has prompted various bills from state lawmakers over the years, including a 2011 law that required law enforcement agencies to send all new kits to a crime lab within 30 days.
In 2017, Texas legislators also passed a bill that allowed Texans to donate to a fund for ending the state’s backlog when applying for driver licenses.
Harris County officials said Thursday that they will use an $83,000 grant funded by that program to test rape kits in rural counties, where they said law enforcement officers are not always able to follow up on investigations because of the distance between test sites.
The backlog of untested rape kits at the Texas Department of Public Safety’s crime lab, which at one point numbered nearly 19,000, has decreased to about 2,100, according to the Joyful Heart Foundation, which tracks rape kit backlogs.
Ilse Knecht, director of policy at Joyful Heart, said tracking systems are crucial to transparency.
“Ensuring all stakeholders in the criminal justice process can know the location and status of all newly collected sexual assault evidence kits will bring transparency to evidence kit processing and prevent a backlog from happening again,” she said.
Houston lawyer Randall Kallinen represented two women who were raped by serial offenders in a lawsuit against the Houston Police Department and others.
In that 2017 lawsuit, which later was dismissed, the two women alleged their civil rights were violated because HPD failed to test the DNA of their attackers, who had committed earlier crimes.
Kallinen said the new initiative would give “empowerment to people who really are in need of such empowerment.”
“Who but the victim would be the best advocate?” he said. “And so, if they’re given the tools to be an advocate for themselves, that’s great.”
Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo said the initiative was crucial to stopping violent offenders.
The city of Houston previously faced a backlog of more than 6,600 untested rape kits, some of them decades old. The city spent millions of dollars in local and grant funds to get them tested, many of them by outsourcing the work to private labs.
While clearing that backlog, Acevedo and Ogg said, authorities uncovered roughly 1,000 matches in the FBI’s national DNA database.
“These are 1,000 potential investigations and actual cases that bring rapists to justice,” Ogg said.