"In 2009, a Wayne County assistant prosecuting attorney noticed thousands of rape kits stacked on the shelves of a Detroit Police Department storage facility. The kits are used to collect and store DNA evidence obtained from sexual assault survivors. These particular kits had been in storage for up to 30 years, and their contents had never been processed or properly investigated."<p>This is appalling. One would expect solving rape and murder to be the highest priority for the police.<p>A quick Google shows that in 2013 there were over 3000 arrests for marijuana possession in the same county. The resources used to make those arrests could have been used instead to investigate and prosecute the perpetrators identified by those rape kits. Victims of violent crime are now also victims of the war on drugs.
"But some skeptics of these types of partnerships say that private citizens already pay taxes and should not be expected to pay for added expenditures that are the responsibility of the government."<p>Sort of, but no. The entire problem with Detroit is you draw arbitrary lines on the ground, and allow people and capital to flow freely across those lines, but don't allow taxes to flow across those lines.
A lot of untested rape kits are untested because there is no actual controversy over whether or not sex happened or with whom, just over whether it was consensual.
On the one hand, I'm really strongly in favor of this, but there's one thing that makes me question the 100% test coverage paradigm: what happens when a kit is collected, but police use other methods (victim testimony, security footage, eyewitness accounts, etc.) to apprehend the perpetrator? That doesn't seem like an instance where a kit necessarily must be tested.
It's one thing to go after the rapists after all these years, but how about also going after the police officers, captains and chiefs that approved of stashing evidence of major sex crimes on shelves? There are surely many cases where the rapists, because their crimes weren't prosecuted the first time, went on and re-offended due to this criminal negligence. The moral bankruptcy is pretty high here.