KBI and Kansas City police find money to test rape kits

DNA evidence from more than 2,000 Kansas rapes and sexual assaults sat untested in storage rooms, the state found last year.

In Kansas City, police held more than 1,000 untested kits.

Many of the cases remained unsolved or weren’t prosecuted. All were part of a nationwide backlog of tens of thousands of untested rape kits highlighted by advocacy groups in recent years.

Now federal money and other grants will help send many of the Kansas and Kansas City kits to labs for testing.

The Kansas Bureau of Investigation last month received a $2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Justice to test kits across the state. The Kansas City Police Department received a similar grant for more than $300,000.

In addition to possibly solving some cases with DNA evidence, law enforcement officials hope to change the way they approach sexual assault investigations. Advocates for sexual assault victims have been calling for such changes for years.

“This is certainly something that’s taken off on the national level, and more states are starting to get involved,” said Kathy Ray, director of advocacy at the Kansas Coalition Against Sexual and Domestic Violence, who worked with the KBI on the grant. “We really feel like testing these kits is an important step toward justice for victims and accountability for offenders.”

The figure of 2,008 untested kits stored by Kansas law enforcement agencies last year was only an estimate and may grow over the next six months. In addition to harvesting the DNA evidence from untested kits, the federal money will go toward learning more about how and why some kits are not tested. Officials hope to improve the practices of prosecutors, police and others involved in sexual assault investigations.

“The move here is to really identify some best practices, from start to finish,” Ray said.

Her group hopes for a uniform practice across the state in how rape kits are handled. Today there are model policies at the national level, but individual hospitals and law enforcement agencies have their own rules.

Problems with rape kits exist in both urban areas, which see large numbers of assaults, and rural communities short on resources to address the cases they have, Ray said.

In Kansas City, a rape victim advocacy group found 1,324 untested kits in police storage earlier this year.

Police said priority was given to testing the kits of people who wanted cases prosecuted. They said about half of the untested kits belonged to people who aren’t ready to go to court, although police hang on to the evidence in case victims change their minds.

Evidence also may go untested when prosecutors decide charges aren’t warranted, the suspect agrees to enter a plea or the assault occurs outside the city’s jurisdiction.

To help get more kits tested, Kansas City police received a $337,197 grant from the Manhattan district attorney’s office in New York. The money could help send 490 rape kits to a lab.

The reasons given by police for not testing kits, and the barriers to successfully prosecuting some cases, are real, said Ilse Knecht, director of policy for the Joyful Heart Foundation, which found the untested kits through a public records request.

Part of the group’s mission is to press for legislation that would require more testing and better record keeping of untested kits.

“The intent of that is to press for transparency and accountability,” Knecht said.

When the DNA evidence from a kit is added to a national database of criminal suspects, it can link a perpetrator to sexual abuse incidents, burglaries and rapes separated by years across several states.

In St. Louis, Joyful Heart found no backlog of untested rape kits because the police department tested nearly all the kits it collected.

Such rigorous policies say something about how society treats sexual assault victims, Knecht said.

“The message that you’re sending is that what happened to you does matter. It’s important, what happened to them is important, and to the perpetrator the message is that they will be held accountable for their crimes.”

This story was originally published October 31, 2015 at 3:53 PM with the headline "KBI and Kansas City police find money to test rape kits."