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Detroit Businesswomen Team Up to Get Rape Kits Tested
- ck2 11y agoThis is government failure 101 Maybe we need a startup that reduces the cost from $1500 to $150
- ayuvar 11y agoFrom the article, they've already managed to negotiate the price to $490 (through, I assume, a bulk discount). Some of the testing has already been funded by the state of Detroit (albeit very late) and the federal government. At $150 per kit it would still cost the group $1.7 million to test every kit. Not to mention that a large part of the expense is projected to be the cost of getting detectives to investigate and arrest based on the results of the tests, which private industry probably can't provide.
- ck2 11y agoAt $150 per test there would be no backlog and rapists might not be allowed to become repeat offenders. This is not just some situation where as long as it is eventually done, that is all that matters. Time is critical. This was failure.
- leejoramo 11y agoThis article doesn't go into these details. I recall reading in prior articles on this, that many of these kits are processed by private labs. Even the tests are done by the state, the costs will largely be related to the expense of the technology which was likely created by a bio-tech startup.
- thrownaway2424 11y ago"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." 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.
- patrickmay 11y ago"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." This is appalling. One would expect solving rape and murder to be the highest priority for the police. 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.
- chimeracoder 11y ago> The resources used to make those arrests could have been used instead to investigate and prosecute the perpetrators identified by those rape kits. In theory, yes. In practice, no, they couldn't, because police officers aren't generally qualified to be processing and/or investigating rape kits. We can't even say that they should have hired fewer officers and spent the money on people qualified to investigate these cases instead, because the LEO unions ensure that those cops stay employed (and also explicitly lobby for drug criminalization so that those officers have work to do). EDIT clarified "criminalization" wording
- guelo 11y agoWhy the hell does it cost $1500? 23andMe does their test for $199.
- frandroid 11y agoThe threshold for standing in court as proof, compared to giving you some statistical averages, might differ.
- cushychicken 11y agoOn the one hand, I'm really strongly in favor of this, but there's one thing that makes me question the 100% test coverage paradigm: what happens when a kit is collected, but police use other methods (victim testimony, security footage, eyewitness accounts, etc.) to apprehend the perpetrator? That doesn't seem like an instance where a kit necessarily must be tested.
- DanBC 11y agoOr when both people accept that sex happened, but one says it was consensual while the other says it wasn't.
- mikeash 11y agoIn a case like that, why not test the kit anyway just to be sure? If it matches the suspect, then you can rest even easier knowing you got the right person. If it doesn't, then you've avoided imprisoning an innocent. The cost of the test is about the same as a few days of imprisoning the accused, who will probably be put away for many years, so there's no sense trying to trim costs there.
- facepalm 11y agoBecause it costs 1500$ perhaps?
- vijayr 11y agoIt is better to spend that 1500 and make sure to send the right person to jail (even if it is redundant) than take a chance with eyewitness testimony. 1,500$ is nothing compared to the life and freedom of someone.
- facepalm 11y agoWhat if the rapist already confessed? 1500$ would buy a police officer a nice computer. In many countries the police lags far behind the criminals in technical equipment. Edit: hit HN's comment limit again. Anyway: consider this - what if the test isn't 100% reliable? What makes you think it is - because you want to believe that 100% truth can be established? What if it has a false negative rate of 30%, so 30% of actual rapists (who might already have confessed) would be cleared by the test?
- smegel 11y agoBecause there aren't enough black men in jail already...
- frandroid 11y agoIt'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.
- fiatmoney 11y agoA 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.
- cushychicken 11y agoThat's what I was getting at with my comment: there are reasonable scenarios wherein testing a rape kit serves no clear purpose. I'm all for the paradigm of testing them, but I'm not for spending money on cases where there's no contest of sex happening, or the perpetrator confesses.