
Detroit Businesswomen Team Up to Get Rape Kits Tested - thehoff
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/08/business/detroit-businesswomen-team-up-to-get-rape-kits-tested.html
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patrickmay
"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.

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chimeracoder
> 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

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rylee
Do you mean lobby for drug criminalization?

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Zikes
Lobby against drug decriminalization, since it is already criminalized.

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thrownaway2424
"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.

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fiatmoney
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.

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cushychicken
That'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.

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cushychicken
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.

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mikeash
In 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.

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facepalm
Because it costs 1500$ perhaps?

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Vraxx
Seriously.. To agree with a sibling poster, $1500 is a paltry fee to pay to be
sure that you imprison the right person. Especially since it isn't a trivial
charge either. $1500 is also dwarfed by the amount it will cost to imprison
the suspect for the duration of their sentence should they be convicted.

~~~
facepalm
Maybe the kits don't really "make you sure". What do you know about them?

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frandroid
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.

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ck2
This is government failure 101

Maybe we need a startup that reduces the cost from $1500 to $150

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ayuvar
From 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.

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ck2
At $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.

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guelo
Why the hell does it cost $1500? 23andMe does their test for $199.

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frandroid
The threshold for standing in court as proof, compared to giving you some
statistical averages, might differ.

