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Abandoned rape kits identify over 800 serial rapists in one Michigan county
- kelukelugames 9y ago>Over 800 serial rapists, criminals who have struck 10-15 times without being stopped, were identified. 127 convictions have been made this far. The definition of serial rapist is 10+ victims. That's a lot of them in one county. o_O
- ben_w 9y agoPopulation: 1,749,366. Kits: 11,341. Judging by how many women I know who have been willing to say they have been raped — and no, I don’t mean just pressured into something they regretted — this is probably less than one tenth of the victims.
- loeg 9y agoThese are the kits that went untested and were forgotten in a warehouse over the course of years. Some percentage of kits were tested and not forgotten in this warehouse. The numbers here don't tell us how many kits are taken annually, what percentage of women report and get a kit done at the hospital, or how many years' worth of kits this was.
- loeg 9y agoThis is the county that contains Detroit, once the largest city in the US. And still quite large, despite the attrition.
- gumby 9y ago> Detroit, once the largest city in the US Not even close. At its peak, in 1950, it had 1.6M to New York's 7.8M. BTW Wikipedia has various "Demographic history of" pages to satisfy your curiosity.
- MadAnthonyWayne 9y agoIt was 5th with 1.8 million people, and was 4th in the 20s, 30s, and 40s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities_in_the_United_States_by_population_by_decade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities_in_the_... Perhaps you could use Wikipedia to satisfy your curiosity
- richardwhiuk 9y agoI'm not sure what your point is here? 4th or 5th is not very close to being largest (especially amongst cities which tend to have exponential curves in population - e.g. it's not surprising the 1st most populous city to be 3-5x the next largest)
- MadAnthonyWayne 9y agoOnly point is the parent was a) Wrong on the population in the year given b) Choose the incorrect decade for peak population with respect to the size of other cities in the US. c) Gave a snide remark to the user to use Wikipedia while unable to do so themselves... [Edit rate limited reply] Well I guess you learn something new everyday, but the parent insinuated the poster did not know this to be the case with the BTW, so you can read it however you'd like
- astura 9y agoThat remark was not snide... I found it informative, I had no idea Wikipedia had "Demographic history of" pages.
- loeg 9y agoThis is nitpicking. The point is, Wayne county has a really really large population — this isn't some random rural county.
- jsmthrowaway 9y agoI'm not sure being called out for claiming that Detroit was once the largest city in the United States is "nitpicking." That's just a factually wrong statement, and as a Detroit native, sets up a narrative (unintentionally, I'm guessing) that we fell from grace even harder than we did. "Detroit was once larger than New York City" is an implied claim that would unjustly amplify the collapse of Detroit to an audience that doesn't know better, particularly internationally. We fell, but not that hard. I understood your underlying point, but I don't think the correction is attempting to nitpick you, just striving for accuracy.
- loeg 9y agoEdit: One of the largest by population — 4th largest from the 1920s-40s. I believe it also held claim to the largest city by land area. (Not counting metro area — just city limits.)
- kilroy123 9y agoInsane. I'm definitely not a tough on crime kind of person, but these are people who are unfit to live in society. There should be no rehabilitation for these people. I hate to say it, but lock them up and throw away the key.
- swombat 9y agoBased on your statements here it doesn’t seem like you hate to say it. Why should there be no rehabilitation for this crime? If it is possible to fix these thoroughly broken people, why not do it?
- orwin 9y agoIt's the second time rape is evoqued in two days, so i'll add my personnal anecdote. Both my parents were social workers, my mother as a psychologist, my dad as youth camp director (Not a summer youth camp, more like a permanent youth camp that help children (6-15) with difficulties manage their homework, organize football/basketball tournament after school...)). This line of work made them befriend a huge variety of people, especially a prison counselor and a judge specialized in minor protection. Well, the discussions when they came home were "fun". One of those discussion was about a young man who raped a young girl. The judge said something like "it's the first time i felt guilt and compassion from a rapist". It was disturbing, so i asked her to tell me a little more than this, and she told me that at most, rapists regrets being caught, regret "not being able to control themselves" but she can never feel sentiment over the victim except jealousy. The prison counselor and my mother agreed, and my mother even said that the boy might be either a really good faker, either an extreme case. Later i learned that the boy had a schizophrenic episode and was send to a mental hospital rather than prison (as he should). I have nothing to conclude this, but i do think personnally than most rapist should be on watch after a prosecution, and should be really costly. I don't think they can reform, and the only way second crime to be safe from them is to take them out of the society (aka long prison time).
- gamblor956 9y agoSex crimes are very difficult to rehabilitate; the recidivism rate is the highest of any category of crime. Even worse, the the more serious the crime, the higher the recidivism rate gets, which is generally the opposite of most other types of crime. Source: I used to work for the sex crimes unit of the public defender.
- Amorymeltzer 9y agoNot to diminish the magnitude of this, but those numbers appear to be an error on the part of boingboing. Thankfully the source has been updated, and says: >One of the most astounding findings here is that you've identified 817 serial rapists. That's 817 people who attacked more than one person >A rapist rapes on average seven to 11 times before they're caught. ... Of our set of 817 ... over 50 of them have 10 to 15 hits apiece. Still horrifying.
- quirkot 9y agoMy god, how do you leave over 11k crimes just sitting in a store room... in one county. I'm glad they're addressing this gross miscarriage of justice. Hope it's an isolated thing (but not actually expecting it to be so)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dsfyu404ed 9y agoAn organization that forgets about 11,000 pieces of evidence that could become easy statistics boosters probably has equally sloppy procedures for handling and processing that evidence. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/epic-drug-lab-scandal-results-more-20-000-convictions-dropped-n747891 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/epic-drug-lab-scandal-r...
- MadAnthonyWayne 9y agoThe one county is home to one very big issue, Detroit, in case you weren't paying attention to the early 2000s the city of Detroit was in an utter state of failure with respect to every aspect associated with a modern urban center. Detroit's crime lab was so inept the state shut it down in 2008
- dragonwriter 9y ago> My god, how do you leave over 11k crimes just sitting in a store room... Because if the police had a choice, they wouldn't have collected the evidence in the first place, so when the law required them to collect the evidence and didn't require them to do anything with it, the results were predictable; that's why the newer law sets timelines for testing. > Hope it's an isolated thing (but not actually expecting it to be so) It's not, there's lots of stories about untested rape kits nationally, most of which don't have the “we finally tested them and convicted some rapists” silver lining.
- dguaraglia 9y agoNotice the uproar whenever people encounter the term "rape culture", yet when pieces like this come out, nobody puts two and two together: oh shit, maybe when people complain about rape culture, what they mean is that we don't take sexual assault half as seriously as we should.
- smegel 9y agoGet this rape shit off HN, are we suffering a feminazi invasion or something?
- sctb 9y agoWe've banned this account. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- athenot 9y ago> but because it's sexual assault, for whatever reason, it's very easy for some folks to sweep this under the rug Wow. Just wow. I get that resources are limited and they must prioritize. But to view sexual assault as a low-priority item is just sick.
- jrs95 9y agoDefinitely. I can see not prioritizing it over anything that could immediately kill someone, but it (and any other criminal evidence) ought to be the very next thing on the list. And they've got the resources to handle those things. Perhaps part of the problem is how they're compensated based on how many beds they have and how many procedures they're performing etc
- Kalium 9y agoWe're talking about a place that struggles to have a functional response to murder and fire.
- grasshopperpurp 9y agoBut, it's not just a problem with Detroit. It seems to be an issue everywhere. http://www.endthebacklog.org/ending-backlog/state-responses http://www.endthebacklog.org/ending-backlog/state-responses
- Kalium 9y agoI don't know what the problem is other places. Detroit just has the kinda-somewhat-reasonable justification that they're struggling to provide the most basic of services.
- jdietrich 9y agoCommunities all over America are struggling to provide basic services. Detroit is an extreme case, but it isn't an edge case.
- jrs95 9y agoWere the ones they've identified repeat offenders or something? I was under the impression that a relatively small % of the population had their DNA in a database.
- dsfyu404ed 9y agoIf you are suspected of a crime in which DNA is relevant and set foot in a police station it's not unheard of for them to ask you if you'd like a water in case you drink from it and leave the bottle in the trash.
- lolc 9y agoIs there any documented case of this?
- astura 9y agoI watch a lot of true stories about how crimes are solved and this does happen though not a lot. Sometimes police tail a suspect and wait until they leave their DNA somewhere, like if they drop a cigarette butt on the ground or if they throw a drink cup away.
- unit91 9y agoHere's one where an armrest of a chair was swabbed at the police station. https://www.policeone.com/legal/articles/8691418-How-surreptitious-DNA-sampling-is-knocking-on-the-Supreme-Courts-door/ https://www.policeone.com/legal/articles/8691418-How-surrept...
- astura 9y agoYes, "serial" means "repeat" in this context. Specifically, TFA said that they defined "serial rapist" as those who raped 10-15 times without being caught.
- dragonwriter 9y agoThe boingboing article says that, but the actual source (Detroit Free Press) article that underlies it makes it clear that the threshold is lower and the boingboing write-up is misstating the facts: “Of our set of 817 ... over 50 of them have 10 to 15 hits apiece.” https://www.freep.com/story/opinion/columnists/nancy-kaffer/2017/12/17/rape-kit-detroit/953083001/ https://www.freep.com/story/opinion/columnists/nancy-kaffer/...
- troels 9y agoIt says they were found in 2009. I wonder what period they were from then?
- lolc 9y ago"In 2009, 11,341 untested sexual assault kits — the results of an hours-long process that collects evidence from the body of a rape victim — were found during a routine tour of a Detroit police storage warehouse, some dating back to 1984." https://www.freep.com/story/opinion/columnists/nancy-kaffer/2017/12/17/rape-kit-detroit/953083001/ https://www.freep.com/story/opinion/columnists/nancy-kaffer/...
- nether 9y ago> 86% of our victims in these untested kits are people of color. You're not going to find too many blond-haired, blue eyed white women ... Because their kits are treated differently, their cases are solved. That's just the way it is in this country. If you're a person of color, if you're a different economic class, then your case across the board, across the board, not just sexual assault — they're treated differently. And that's just the truth. People may not want to admit it, but I've seen it throughout my career and I know it's true Wow.
- MadAnthonyWayne 9y agoFYI the Demographics of the city of Detroit is roughly 86% black, to put it in perspective, it's not out of the statistical norm of the city's population
- Avshalom 9y agoWayne County is only 40% and this goes back as far as '84 when Detroit City was less than 75%
- MadAnthonyWayne 9y agoDoes not matter what percentage of the county is black, what matters is what percentage of the population is where the rapes occurred, these rapes weren't all happening in the Pointes, Northville, Livonia, etc. The majority of these kits are from a period of time where the Demographics were over 80% black in the city.
- gumby 9y agoThere's so much more money and excitement to be gained in fighting the drug "menace" it's no wonder actual violent crimes were ignored.
- jessaustin 9y agoYes it seems odd that no legislator has proposed that the vast sums spent fighting a "Drug War" that can't be won be redirected to more important uses like this. If police could focus on violence only, so many problems we have would simply disappear.
- gumby 9y agoI am pretty sure the fact that the drug "war" can't be won is part of its appeal.
- nottorp 9y agoPray tell, what's a "rape kit"? I assume it's not a kit that makes raping someone easier...
- gknoy 9y agoFrom Wikipedia: "A package of items used by medical personnel for gathering and preserving physical evidence following an allegation of sexual assault." 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_kit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_kit
- jerf 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_kit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_kit However, this is not just a "let me google that for you" response as you are wise to narrow your search, such as what I did with "site:en.wikipedia.org rape kit", lest, uh, you potentially get hit with a lot of hits that are about what you say.
- belak 9y agoIt's "a package of items used by medical personnel for gathering and preserving physical evidence following an allegation of sexual assault." They're generally used for gathering and preserving DNA evidence in the case of sexual assault. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_kit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_kit
- dang 9y agoYou can do better than that. Please don't post like this to HN.
- nottorp 9y agoSensitive much? When a commercial service that's not widely known is mentioned without an explanation of what it is everyone complains. I still don't see why I'm supposed to know what that thing is, since I'm neither police nor a rapist.
- danielvf 9y agoThe kits were from 1984 to 2009. It sounds like cases were being marked closed (usually incorrectly) before the kits were processed and the DNA added to the database. Thus, the kits were tossed into storage. For background, this is Detroit. Wayne County, in which this happened, is demographically more than 40% Black. From the article “86% of our victims in these untested kits are people of color.“ The city government was essentially bankrupt for many years before making it official in 2013. Funding for testing and investigating these kits happened in 2015. The number of convictions since then is almost scary - that’s more than one conviction per week. Press releases here: https://www.waynecounty.com/elected/prosecutor/detroit-rape-kit-project.aspx https://www.waynecounty.com/elected/prosecutor/detroit-rape-...
- wavefunction 9y agoThis is a problem that crosses socio-ethnic boundaries as well, unfortunately. Not that I mean to minimize the historic and ongoing mistreatment of minority crime victims... Austin Texas -a predominantly white and affluent city- has a terrible history of mistreatment of rape kits, 850 in this case: http://www.statesman.com/news/local/city-memo-mold-found-containers-about-850-austin-police-rape-kits/qEZ7rV5h3gnrcJPdJtMhjM/ http://www.statesman.com/news/local/city-memo-mold-found-con...
- code_duck 9y agoAustin has plenty of poor people, and the white population is somewhat under 50 percent - 47 according to recent estimates. Hispanic population is about 36%. Keep in mind Austin is the core downtown city, and if you’re thinking of affluence and whiteness, you might be thinking of the suburbs. It’s possible that economically disadvantaged nonwhite people maybe disproportionately represented among rape victims, also there exists a possibility that there is economic or racial bias in the processing of rape kits.
- IWeldMelons 9y agoAustin is a mostly suburban city. Just look at the map.
- DoreenMichele 9y agoMy recollection is that it is partly money. They have to make judgement calls on where to spend the money, and someone who has worked as a prostitute is less likely to be a case you can successfully convict, so it gets cut. (Which is then self fulfilling prophecy because without the DNA evidence, it is less likely to get a conviction.) Mariska Hargitay of SVU fame is behind this stuff. I couldn't readily find the blurb I was looking for, but found an interview that says there are 175k unprocessed rape kits in the US. Helping to end the backlog sounds like a worthy cause. Bonus that it will help redress racism and classism to some small degree since it is poor people and people of color disproportionately impacted by the backlog of unprocessed rape kits.
- sigstoat 9y ago> I couldn't readily find the blurb I was looking for, but found an interview that says there are 175k unprocessed rape kits in the US. not to dismiss that entire number (or even much of it), but it's worth noting that many locales will collect anonymous rape kits. but a rape kit without any kind of identifying information on it is of no evidentiary value (you can't establish chain of custody, and you don't have a victim, etc). further, forensic laboratories frequently operate under regulations which forbid them from testing samples which don't have any identifying information. so a fraction of these unprocessed kits can't be processed, and even if you did, you can't do anything with the information.
- gph 9y agoWhat is the purpose of an anonymous rape kit? From your post it sounds like it doesn't really have a purpose to any criminal investigation, but if that's the case why are they even collecting it in the first place?
- DoreenMichele 9y agohttp://victimsofcrime.org/our-programs/dna-resource-center/untested-sexual-assault-kits/unreported-sexual-assault-kits http://victimsofcrime.org/our-programs/dna-resource-center/u...
- dragonwriter 9y agoActual source article: https://www.freep.com/story/opinion/columnists/nancy-kaffer/2017/12/17/rape-kit-detroit/953083001/ https://www.freep.com/story/opinion/columnists/nancy-kaffer/... The boingboing article just excerpts part of it, and inaccurately summarizes some of the rest, so it's worth skipping to the original source.
- sctb 9y agoThanks! We've updated the link from https://boingboing.net/2017/12/18/11341-abandoned-rape-kits-ide.html https://boingboing.net/2017/12/18/11341-abandoned-rape-kits-....
- Grollicus 9y agoHow can this even happen? How can you misplace 11k rape kits in a way that doesn't disrupt trust in the chain of custody? Does DNA evidence degrade after some time? Are there juristical time limits? Also imagine you're now happily married to some guy for 10 years and suddenly the police comes knocking. Can't protect yourself against stuff like that. Slow procecution is just all around bad for the society.
- sigstoat 9y ago> How can you misplace 11k rape kits in a way that doesn't disrupt trust in the chain of custody? if they went into some warehouse properly tagged, and were still sealed and in the warehouse N years later, that's generally going to be good enough. if the defense wants to raise some objection, they're welcome to, but they'd need to come up with some actual reason the chain was broken. like, records that the warehouse was broken in to during the time that sample was stored, or, the EV tape was cut and not resealed by some testing tech, etc.
- roel_v 9y agoIn Belgium, the "palace of justice" in Brussels has a basement with evidence from decades of (yet to be closed) cases. The building is in such bad shape that there is water coming in at times, plaster falling off the ceiling, some rooms being unsuitable for use as the ceiling might literally fall on your head. The evidence basement has rows and rows of metal shelving with bags of coke, suitcases of money, and here and there a jar with a cut off finger, or foot, or head. (Most shelves are mundane if course, not saying it's only money and coke).
- nitwit005 9y agoAssuming they started right away, that's one prosecution every 23 days or so. That's a pretty impressive pace for a single prosecutor and her assistants.
- keevie 9y agoWhy don't women go to the police more often when they're raped? Sure is a mystery.
- jstarfish 9y agoIt becomes a legal proceeding. Like any legal proceeding, your trauma now has to be relived over the course of a criminal trial, with you having to go up on a stand and recount the entire experience and be called a liar in a public forum by opposing counsel and have all your neighbors (and the world) know more about you than you'd like and fashion all manner of horrible opinions of you. Nobody wants to go through that. Not to mention when your attacker is someone you know, and you wrestle with whether or not you might have implied consent will result in absolutely ruining someone else's life with the mere allegation. It's not a light matter. Most cases actually aren't performed at gunpoint in an alley.
- orf 9y ago> You're not going to find too many blond-haired, blue eyed white women ... Because their kits are treated differently, their cases are solved. That's just the way it is in this country. If you're a person of color, if you're a different economic class, then your case across the board, across the board, not just sexual assault — they're treated differently. And that's just the truth. People may not want to admit it, but I've seen it throughout my career and I know it's true ... It's just true. ... Race is at the center of this in many ways as well, unfortunately, we know that across the criminal justice system. ... :/
- wewrweoi389083 9y agoWhile I understand the sentiment is a common one, I disagree with the premise that these things are due to race. This is due to economic inequality, with race being used by the wealthy as a tool to pit the majority against each other, no different from how religion was used to label the pious and heathens. It's binary nonsense. There are parts of the country where you WILL find poor white people being treated the same. I grew up in one; rich construction company owners kids get busted for growing pot, are let off the hook by the judge who throws the book at poor white kids living in the trailer park doing the same. The trailer park kids were doing to support the family cause they couldn't find a job due prior felonies related to crimes undertaken to again feed the family. And the judges speak to it with scary justifications like (paraphrasing a longwinded rant) "If God didn't want those kids in jail, he'd have given their family a construction company for them to manage some day." White wives are beaten and abused daily. Cops do nothing. Wife maims husband, goes to prison. The meme as I see it: The rich are given a pass, they are just following their manifest destiny. Poor people don't appear to have one, so fuck them.
- patrickg_zill 9y agoGiven what I have heard of from older relatives in rural areas, this is "in the main" correct. My aunt, quite old, remembers a time when corporal punishment (being hit with a sturdy broomstick, or rapped across the knuckles etc.) was OK in the school she attended. It was always the poorer kids that got the corporal punishment... not the better-off ones.
- unclepresent 9y agoCan any news from Detroit be presented now without giving story a racial twist. I clicked the link expecting get details of what had happened and found a person giving me a moral lecture.
- Falling3 9y ago>86% of our victims in these untested kits are people of color. Calling it a "racial twist" sounds completely disingenuous to me. There is obviously a strong racial component here. Why do you think it's a problem to point that out?
- pavon 9y agoNot when 82% of the population are African American.
- sp332 9y agoThe county is only 40% black. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/waynecountymichigan/PST045216 https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/waynecountymich... And the kits were put in storage from 1984-2009, during which time the demographics of Detroit changed very rapidly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Detroit#Table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Detroit... It wasn't always 80% black.
- pavon 9y agoVery good points. Thank you.
- MadAnthonyWayne 9y agoThey're actually terrible points, which are very shallow and not pertinent to the situation
- rhino369 9y ago
- everyone 9y agoThat website is a monstrosity
- haltingthoughts 9y agoWhen are we going to separate prosecution so that a non-govermental agency could get access to these and perform the prosecution themselves?
- mmaunder 9y agoWould love to learn more about the methodology and how they tested over 11k kits and came up with their results, did their investigations and achieved their convictions. Not much on that on boingboing or the source article.
- theptip 9y ago> Ten thousand rape kits tested. One hundred twenty-seven convictions won, 1,947 cases investigated, 817 serial rapists identified. This is crazy. I wonder how much it costs to test a kit; this could be a very high-utility charitable donation. Looks like there is a charity that is pushing this issue (linked from the OP): http://endthebacklog.org http://endthebacklog.org [edited to add, looks like $8,893 per kit, from http://endthebacklog.org/backlog/why-testing-matters http://endthebacklog.org/backlog/why-testing-matters. Not as cheap as I hoped, not as good an investment as mosquito nets (http://www.businessinsider.com/the-worlds-best-charity-can-save-a-life-for-333706-and-thats-a-steal-2015-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/the-worlds-best-charity-can-s...) but I suspect that's a pretty good return on investment if you want to donate to a US charity.]
- blueline 9y agoI think you're misinterpreting the content of that page. the same source says $1000-$1500 per kit http://www.endthebacklog.org/backlog/why-backlog-exists http://www.endthebacklog.org/backlog/why-backlog-exists I'm not exactly sure what the meaning of the $8000 savings statistic on the page you linked refers to.
- theptip 9y agoThanks - my bad. That's more like what I would have guessed.
- rhizome 9y agoI think you misunderstood the $8893, which is how much was saved by testing the kits in Cleveland.
- cperciva 9y agoSomething to keep in mind here: Testing these kids is orders of magnitude cheaper now than it was when they started piling up back in 1984. This isn't to say that they shouldn't be tested now -- they absolutely should -- but it's less clear that they were wrong to throw the kits into storage at the time. (Especially if they thought for some reason that the case had been resolved without needing to run DNA tests.)
- shkkmo 9y ago> Q: One of the most astounding findings here is that you've identified 817 serial rapists. That's 817 people who attacked more than one person — and crimes that could possibly have been prevented if those people had been caught. > A: This is how I try to put it in context for people: There are estimated to be 400,000 untested rape kits in the country. In one city, in one county, in one state, we had 11,341. ... so a bit of back of the envelope math (assuming these number are generalizable), that means we could have somewhere in the neighborhood of 30k unidentified serial rapists in the country.
- leephillips 9y agoThere was no (space for) discussion of methodology in the article. In reading about these cases one should keep in mind that a forensic DNA test does not uniquely identify an individual, and, if it's used to match for someone in a large database, you must beware the epidemiological fallacy. It's also possible that what appears to be a single "serial rapist" may be more than one criminal.
- turc1656 9y agoI think the most disturbing thing about this is that there are even 800 serial rapists in one single county, even if it's over a 30-35 year period. That's around 25 serial rapists a year in that one county, which is kind of extraordinary when you think about it. Serial rapists are supposedly incredibly rare. They say that in nearly every case it's someone that the victim knows. This makes me think twice about that. And these are just the ones they identified! And in just one county! I have a young daughter and information like this kind of terrifies me.
- rhino369 9y ago>Serial rapists are supposedly incredibly rare. They say that in nearly every case it's someone that the victim knows. Serial rapists aren't rare, but they do know their victims typically.
- opencl 9y ago"Serial rapist" means "has more than one victim", not "rapes strangers". It is entirely possible for one person to rape ten people who know and trust them, and not at all surprising that anyone sleazy enough to do this would likely be a repeat offender especially when there's such a high probability of getting away with it. The numbers are quite staggering though: "A rapist rapes on average seven to 11 times before they're caught. ... Of our set of 817 ... over 50 of them have 10 to 15 hits apiece."
- kaitai 9y agoSerial rapists aren't that rare. Here's a Fivethirtyeight article that covers the two major studies about that over the last few years: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-if-most-campus-rapes-arent-committed-by-serial-rapists/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-if-most-campus-rap... The crux of the disagreement between the two major studies is that one indicates serial rapists commit most rapes, while the other indicates 10.8% of college men are rapists and many do not do so serially. Anyhow, gives some stats to pin calculations on.
- excalibur 9y agoIt's not any old county. Wayne County is the most populous county in the state. It includes the city of Detroit and much of the surrounding metro area.
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- MechEStudent 9y agoAbsolutely inexcusable.
- volkl48 9y agoI fully believe that plenty of these were not tested because of bias/incompetence/whatever. With that said, I'm not sure if the idea of testing them primarily for database purposes was really on the radar in the 80s-90s. Did these national databases even exist in this sort of form then? ------------------ If the answer to that question is no, then a lot of them weren't tested for understandable reasons. You have a lot of cases that fit one of the following: - The victim has decided it wasn't a rape/they don't want to pursue the case. As with domestic violence charges, there's a whole lot of these cases where the victim decides they no longer want to pursue it. And while the state can sometimes make a domestic violence case without victim cooperation, it's pretty much impossible to do so for a rape case. No one beats the shit out of themselves, so you can sometimes make a DV case stick without assistance from victim testimony/cooperation. People have sex consensually, so you mostly can't. - There is a case the victim is cooperating with, but the (accused) rapist is known and is not disputing that the intercourse occurred, just if it was consensual. Testing the "rape kit" just proves intercourse, which is not what the trial is hinging on.
- rokhayakebe 9y agoA rapist rapes on average seven to 11 times before they're caught. Is this an illness?
- sandworm101 9y agoTake these numbers with a grain of salt. That a rape kit was performed doesn't mean that a rape actually occurred. Some subset of these would have been from cases where prosecutors/cops determined that whatever happened didn't amount to rape. Evidence is collected before such decisions are made. Then there is another subset of cases where everyone agrees that a rape did occur, but prosecutors nevertheless decide not to prosecute. Sometimes that occurs because the likely perpetrator is already facing other charges. Or sometimes the victim decides not to participate. It is not uncommon for a victim to withdraw, to not want to testify. It's a horrible state of affairs but happens and alters the numbers.
- sitkack 9y agoSomeone besides the rapists deserve lengthy jail time.
- tomcam 9y agoIt is doubly tragic because the process of obtaining evidence with a rape kit is invasive, time consuming, and uncomfortable when done by a sensitive and properly trained examiner. Very often the examiners were men who were openly hostile to the victims, and many women refused to be examined when they discovered what was involved.
- berbec 9y agoKym Worthy 2020. She has my vote. Amazing story.
- marcoperaza 9y agoHaving these kits evaluated and the DNA indexed is certainly valuable. Multiple kits revealing the same person is definitely valuable information for law enforcement. But something this article ignores is that the DNA collected for a rape kit does not prove that a rape occurred. It proves that sexual intercourse occurred. In some cases, there will be evidence of physical injuries for a rape kit. The accusation, the nature of the evidence in the rape kit, other evidence, the likely credibility of the victim to the jury, etc. all need to be evaluated by the police and prosecutors in deciding whether to continue to pursue a case. This part of the article really gets it wrong: >Q: If you arrest someone for homicide, let's say the wrong person gets arrested, no one tries to convince the people there wasn't a homicide. A: Right. Q: They might say it was the wrong guy, or we can't find the person who did it, but no one says there wasn't a murder. Actually, people do argue that there wasn't a murder. Not every killing is a murder, if it is in self-defense for example. Interestingly, I think the person being interviewed realizes this is not a very good argument, so they more or less ignore the reporter on this point. But the reporter is clearly not looking at this story critically.
- dandare 9y ago> Since most jurisdictions do not have systems for counting or tracking rape kits, we cannot be sure of the total number of untested rape kits nationwide. Additionally, there is no federal law mandating a tracking and testing rape kits. It is estimated, however, that there are hundreds of thousands of untested kits in police and crime lab storage facilities throughout the country. http://www.endthebacklog.org/backlog-what-it/defining-rape-kit-backlog http://www.endthebacklog.org/backlog-what-it/defining-rape-k... I don't want to sound anti American but to an European, this is just mind blowing. Is there any other developed nation that systematically ignores prosecution of rapes?
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