The poster you’re responding to is making a joke about Todd Akin and his views towards women. Good job looking like a dick AND getting whooshed, all at the same time.
Except that from the kits they’ve tested so far, they’ve come up with 21 serial rapists (IIRC).
Since they’ve only done a very small number of them, there may be a larger problem that could be identified and removed if they’d only test the kits.
Except they haven’t come up with them. They just know they exist, and are linked to particular rapes. And it appears that in some, if not all cases, they were already aware of the serial rapists.
Which isn’t to say that the information is useless. I’m sure that they linked some rapes to particular serial rapists, which will hopefully enable further convictions. But with limited resources and a lot of crime, I don’t think its particularly shocking that the city of detroit hasn’t spent the money to analyse rape kits without a specific expectation of matching it to a suspect.
But we can’t assume the first six hundred kits tested were typical. It’s likely they prioritized the ones they thought had the most chance of producing useful information.
Uh…what’s a rape kit?
Here was the other target of my ire, for those unsure.
Our lab won’t process unless there is a suspect to compare to. It is very rare that they will do a DNA profile then try to blindly match it with the database. So the evidence sits in the evidence room. This is not CSI.
Thanks. That’s what I was picturing.
I imagine one of the reasons this is coming up now is that the number of rapes is falling while (I assume) the price of processing rape kits is decreasing. Presumably at some point, it will start becoming feasible to just process everything and have a DNA database of unsolved rapes that investigators can go “fishing” in to link cases togeather.
That’s the policy in New York. There’s a government run lab that conducts the test so they’re not being sent out to private labs and billed individually. As a result, the policy is that every rape kit gets tested.
As a cross reference, every person who is imprisoned in New York has to submit to a DNA test.
Why is that exactly?
Nm
Money. Time. Lab backlogs. Small chance of success. I’ve never had to push it. There is a proceedure to get it put through the system in the case of serious crimes but it is not automatic. Lab reports usually come back with a blurb like, “DNA was found to be present in sample. Testing will not proceed until a buccal swab is submitted for comparision.”
In New Jersey DNA is taken after conviction not when they go to jail. I have a guy sitting in county right now and I’m waiting for the prosecutor to go in front of a judge to get an order compelling a DNA sample.
+1.
Oh, let’s not be timid. +100.
Republicans are notorious for sabotaging programs to make government workers look bad … then using that as excuse to slash the programs ever more. :smack:
Which is why we have to raise taxes on the poor and middle-class, so that we can properly fund our own rape investigations.