Abandoned rape kits identify over 800 serial rapists in one Michigan county | Hacker News Reader

Abandoned rape kits identify over 800 serial rapists in one Michigan county

freep.com

380 pointsMilnerRoute198 comments

The 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-...

This 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-con...

Austin 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.

Austin is a mostly suburban city. Just look at the map.

Thanks, I’m aware of how the city works since i lived in Austin for a couple of years. I feel like the demographic information that’s available out there can give more information then looking at the map. If you’re talking about APD, it’s fairly urban.

That's kind of how texas works though

Austin is more than the "core downtown city." And I am not talking about Round Rock or Cedar Park or Buda which are majority white.

The downtown/near-downtown is one of the priciest places in the state of Texas as far as real-estate costs and the attendant costs of a matching lifestyle. It's only out in the middle ring of the suburbs of Far North/East/South Austin that it starts getting affordable. That is, until you get back into the affluence again in the northern bedroom communities of Round Rock, Cedar Park and Georgetown.

> also there exists a possibility that there is economic or racial bias in the processing of rape kits.

There were 11,000 untested rape kits over 2 decades. This hardly sounds like a mistake related to some bias. There is obviously a much bigger issue here, it wasn't individual cases being ignored based on some parameters.

I don't see how you figure. State and local governments can and do fail to provide services to neighborhoods or towns, and often the places they fail to serve tend to be poor and majority-minority. Or they could just systemically fail to pursue rapists if the victim fit certain criteria and easily achieve these numbers (the latter is what's suggested in the interview):

> Q: All the things you were talking about, the better tracking system, the new guidelines for when rape kits get tested ... in the National Institute of Justice report on the backlog (by Michigan State University Professor Rebecca Campbell), the big takeaway there was that too often, officers didn't believe victims, and had used disbelief as a way to triage their workload.

> A: They just closed cases, even cases where I think they believed the victim ... They closed cases because the women had worked as prostitutes or had mental illness issues or had substance abuse. Didn't believe them, didn't care, and this was one issue that led to the backlog of these kits.

> Q: That's something we look for in certain victims — when the victim is a teenage boy of color, or a woman who has been raped, we want them to be perfect. They can't have had a drink or have worked as a prostitute, and if they have, there's a mindset that makes them almost ineligible to be a victim.

> A: One of the reasons we have these untested rape kits ... and I can use Detroit as an example, 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 ... 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. ...

> The training aspect is a huge aspect that can turn around this issue. If we cannot treat our sexual assault victims right, especially if justice has been denied to them for so many years, we certainly want to be able to treat our current survivors properly. As you well know, culture change is the hardest kind of change to make.

Then that bigger issue applies to Memphis and Los Angeles, too, both of which had a larger backlog than Detroit. Safer to say that bias and resources are primary causes, since the subtext of what you're saying is that something is "going on" in Detroit.

http://www.endthebacklog.org/backlog/where-backlog-exists-an...

The wealthiest part of Austin, Westlake, barely 5 minutes from downtown, isn't even officially part of Austin.

Thanks, your comment illustrates my intent. I erred in saying downtown. What i meant to say is that Austin the city isn’t necessarily what people think of as ‘Austin’. When I think of South Austin and the area east of I35, especially as it was 8-10 years ago, I picture a working class area with low income hispanic people and my young college friends, not anyone affluent.

Demographically, Detroit is currently over 80% black, perhaps only coincidentally similar to the proportion of untested rape kits. Perhaps.

However, Detroit was ~30% white in 1980, 3x what it is today, and untested rape kits surely fed a perception of intractable crime over the intervening years as white flight killed the city.

Wayne County != Detroit, Detroit might be 80% black, but Wayne County according to what I've read is 40.5% black.

True, but in this case the rape kits came from a Detroit PD warehouse.

The difference is very stark.

Check it out at the Dot Project (turn on the overlay in the lower left).

https://demographics.virginia.edu/DotMap/index.html

That line between green and blue between Warren and Detroit is 8 Mile Road, and yes the split between the south and north sides really is that stark.

Wayne County extends west to Livonia and Plymouth, which is a white, affluent, low-crime area. And south through a lot of other white suburbs.

It's completely believable to me that a random, non-discriminatory processing of rape kits would result in 86% of untested kits coming from people of color on that map.

but north of 8 mile is not Wayne County.

You have to look west and south of detroit to see wayne county that isn't detroit

Looking where I live on that map is disturbing. There are two jails near me and they are practically 100% green. :(

> It's completely believable to me that a random, non-discriminatory processing of rape kits would result in 86% of untested kits coming from people of color on that map.

While you're couching this as hypothetical - this is in direct contradiction to what the prosecutor said as well as her experiences.

I grew up in a suburb of Detroit, in Wayne County. What I recall is that there was practically an ongoing blood feud between Detroit, the county, and the state. Racism may not have been the only factor, but it was a decisive factor. I couldn't make sense of it at the time, being just a kid, but I think it might still be hard to make sense of today.

I certainly don't want to make any excuses for what happened, but one question that crosses my mind is: Did Detroit have any money to investigate these crimes, even if they had wanted to?

> 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. ...

While 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.

Given 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.

And yet, somehow, black people get killed by police a lot more than poor white people.

It may be due to race, it's just not a foregone conclusion.

Are you sure? This study shows that whites are actually killed at a higher rate: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/13/why-a...

Read that study carefully. It may not say what you think it says. The rate for whites is higher but only when counting from a stop already being initiated. Stops are initiated on minorities at tremendously higher rates. Comparing the two outcomes is really tricky.

>The rate for whites is higher but only when counting from a stop already being initiated.

Of course. You consider people who interact with police. Some old lady obviously shouldn't be included in the data.

>Stops are initiated on minorities at tremendously higher rates.

Blacks and latinos commit crimes at higher rates than whites and asians.

This quote is nonsense. As another commenter noted, the 86% of victims being people of color roughly matches the demographics of the city. As Worthy herself notes there are hundreds of thousands untested rape-kits nationwide, affecting predominantly white areas as well. You can see more stats at http://www.endthebacklog.org/backlog/where-backlog-exists-an....

The fact that the backlog has grown so large in Detroit (in relation to other areas) is a consequence of the city being bankrupt. The period of time that the backlog ballooned happened when the city was run by black mayors (note: I'm not saying that as attribution). Also the police department is predominantly made up of blacks, roughly reflecting the demographics of the city. To portray this as a conspiracy against black women is absurd.

> As another commenter noted, the 86% of victims being people of color roughly matches the demographics of the city.

Not at the time the kits were collected, it doesn't.

I'm not sure why consistency with city demographics should matter. Shouldn't it be aligned with the racial demographics of the typical victim?

In Chicago, for instance, 75% of homicide victims are black despite only representing 32% of the population. If a discrepancy that large can exist in homicide data, I'm sure a similar one can be seen for rape in Detroit.

You're right, which is further evidence of the lack of a conspiracy. If we assume that most rapes occur disproportionally in poorer neighborhoods, then 86% of Detroit rapes from 1984-2009 happening to poorer black women sounds quite probable.

but that could be evidence of a different "conspiracy", not about testing rape kits but about policing black neighborhoods-- maybe not enough policing, or maybe policing of a sort that simply doesn't have any good effect on violent crime.

This is a good case of how two important ideas are being conflated to the detriment of the larger lesson to be learned, I think. As far as I can tell, Prosecutor Worthy is making two arguments: (1) Black (assume PoC approx. equals black in this context) rape victims are treated differently than white ones. She bases this on the fact that 86% of unsolved victim cases are from black people (compared to ~40% of the population being black, I don't have the exact figure, took this from danielvf's comment above). (2) That economic class also plays a role in the discrepancy, although this point seems to be less important to her.

The "not going to find too many blond-haired, blue eyed white women" comment is unfortunate, not only because this uses a stereotype but also because it seems she doesn't have the data for this.

The 40% vs 86% discrepancy is staggering, but it would be interesting to verify analytically how class plays a role. I would be extremely surprised if a wealthy black person's rape kit were treated differently than a similar white person in this county. And compare that with other poor, mostly white counties across the nation.

They key, I think, here is class, rather than race. NOT that race is not important, but that can't be the 99% of teh story, as implied here. Cornel West makes this point more bluntly in his recent criticism of Ta-Nehisi Coates (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/17/ta-neh...).

I agree that this is a worthy area of inquiry. If you're interested in data, I highly encourage this type of research - and the data is probably out there to do this.

I do data analysis on news coverage, and there's data to show that we have a predilection to hear about the West (even compared to other geographically close regions):

https://www.nemil.com/s/part2-terrorism.html

As you point out, hard to determine how much of this predilection is due to economic similarity or geography versus cultural/racial/religious.

Beyond that, my gut is that we can actually derive empathy scores across countries or races based on data like this.

Just to expand, even if it does turn out to be a race-based correlation (like we controlled for class, and the discrepancy was still present), we still don't know why.

One version is that a bunch of essentially similar cases come in, then the cases for white people are prioritized over the cases for PoC, because of racism. And therefore they get solved at a disproportionate rate. That's one potential explanation, that may have some potential solutions.

There are a bunch of different potential explanations though.

Maybe white people are more likely to be raped at parties, whereas PoC live in areas with less police enforcement so they are more likely to be raped by random strangers, so the crime is harder to solve.

Maybe black people are understandably less likely to talk to the police while they investigate anything, so it's harder to get witness testimony and the like.

Maybe there was a successful awareness effort targeted at black people, so they are now more likely to report when they are raped, whereas white people only report it when the case is especially egregious and egregious cases have more physical evidence.

I'm just making all these up to demonstrate that there are all kinds of potential explanations of why there's a difference between races even if the individual investigators try just as hard on these cases and the cases are assigned without bias. In basically all these cases the answer about how to improve this situation is different, so it's worth knowing the details. I think it deserves further study.

a race-based correlation (like we controlled for class, and the discrepancy was still present)

Racism runs deep, doesn't it?

I agree with you to a point, but what I would say to you is this: even before we take outright racism into account, poverty is highly racialized (that is to say, you can guess a person's socioeconomic status with much better accuracy than chance with no other information than the person's race), and a stranger might take a black person for someone of lower socio-economic status even if he actually isn't such a person. Stories like Henry Louis Gates' arrest may get disproportionate attention (some of the uproar seemed to make an unseemly argument -- not that, in general, the police shouldn't arrest a man trying to enter his own home, but rather that a Harvard professor shouldn't be subject to that treatment), but they do illustrate this latter point.

> She bases this on the fact that 86% of unsolved victim cases are from black people

You're misrepresenting what she said - she explicitly called out class (not just race) and it you're agreeing with here. Her full quote is:

> can use Detroit as an example, 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 ... It's just true. ... Race is at the center of this in many ways as well, unfortunately, we know that across the criminal justice

It's not about people trying to hide anything. Or about one particular country. You can't shame or guilt trip people into doing the right thing. It never works. You can either pay them or reprogramming their minds. And both those routes are hard and takes generations of sustained work.

> You can't shame or guilt trip people into doing the right thing. It never works.

I don't know that I'd say that.

In America, justice is only available to those who can afford it. If you can't afford months or years of lawyer's fees and don't have the ability to take time away from your job, family and other daily obligations, you're simply out of luck.

It is not quite this dire, there are very competent public prosecutors and defenders. The problem is we accept the wealthy can obtain better and more lawyers, and effectively buy more or better justice as they define it. It's a classist system where justice is treated as a product rather than exclusively as a right.

It is pretty dire when you have a system that incentivized throwing the book at those near the poverty line, so that private prisons could continue to grow.

It is crony capitalism, plain and simple.

I'm against the idea of private run prisons, it seems like something that should be the purview of the state given the lack of legitimate competition, market fundamentals, and ethical considerations.

But that said, is there any real data to support this claim you're making that private prisons incentivizes harsher sentencing of poor people? Besides maybe one or two "bad eggs" stories about judges. ie, data showing a legitimate correlation between the two as a general pattern...

This gets thrown around a lot on Reddit and elsewhere online but I really don't see how private prisons could influence criminal justice system at the other end.

According to Pew Research, as of 2015, ~126,000 prisoners (state & federal) were held in private prisons[1]. As best I can tell, there are/were 2.2 million prisoners in the U.S. at the time. So about 5.7% of the prison population.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/11/u-s-private-...

I may be parsing it incorrectly, but I take "private prisons" less literally since I know that private prisons are the vast minority. Instead of thinking about the prison itself, consider the "prison industrial complex" in a way that you might consider the "military industrial complex." There are a lot of people who make a lot of money off our prison system, and it includes everyone from food suppliers to lawyers.

Also, private companies now house nearly half of immigrant detainees including a $1 Billion facility the Obama administration purchased to hold Central American women and children seeking asylum in the US.

Specific examples of lobbying are easy enough to google. I might suggest starting with the "Kids for Cash" scandal where two judges got millions of dollars in kickbacks from for-profit juvenile detention centers for sending more kids to their facilities.

?but I really don't see how private prisons could influence criminal justice system at the other end.

Then you aren't paying attention.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal

>Two judges, President Judge Mark Ciavarella and Senior Judge Michael Conahan, were convicted of accepting money from Robert Mericle, builder of two private, for-profit youth centers for the detention of juveniles, in return for contracting with the facilities and imposing harsh adjudications on juveniles brought before their courts to increase the number of residents in the centers.

"You know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/7142/7142-h/7142-h.htm#link2H... (Thucydides, book 5, Melian conference)

(tl;dr: the Athenians took Melos, killed the adult males, sold the remaining Melians as slaves, repopulated the island. Eventually they made the Venus de Milo. And so it goes.)

Justice doesn't just come in form of public defenders. I lived in Chicago and had my car improperly towed to the yards. Being a rich computer dork, I could take the time off when the yards were open to go retrieve it. It was only PoC for the entire 3 hours it took me to pay the fine and get my vehicle back, during the day, when anyone with a job would be required to pick up their vehicle.

My job says OK when I tell them I am taking the afternoon off. Most people's don't. Most people's job says, "you're fired!".

One lady lost her car because they found a worn out pot pipe under the driver's seat, while her son was driving the car. For fucks sake. They wanted 1700 to get the car back out of impound. They didn't charge anyone with a crime. But the car was gone.

I on the other hand, had the time to go give my evidence the magistrate and get my 390$ returned due to a improper impound. No working class PoC could have done what I did, on either side of that equation.

The whole time I wanted to scream my lungs out about the fucking level of utter bullshit we inflict on ourselves. I love Chicagoans, but shit, Chicago cops and Chicago justice need to get tossed in the trash.

It probably isn't true that most people would be fired for having to take a half day off to retrieve an impounded car.

Maybe not most but there certainly is an underclass that would. Even if the number is 5%-10%, it's too high.

Sounds like a culture that has embraced Stockholm syndrome. $1700 to get a car out of impound when there was no crime, and yet the people who are getting shot aren't the people who enabled and profit off such an obviously corrupt system.

I'm Canadian and one of my friends ventured out to Boston and saw how racially and economically divided the place was. Like it was too apparent which neighborhoods were black and which were white...which is shocking for us since this is a side of America we never saw before

I remember learning about American history in HS very well, used to study the classics like Kill a Mockingbird, Mississippi Burning, etc. I remember them because the depiction of abuse against blacks were particularly cruel and rage inducing.

Then you read article like this and realize the apartheid never really died, it just became far more covert and systematic.

"You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

The biggest shock to me is the security apparatus that have worked in the background to literally exterminate the black population. Iran-Contra affair have demonized and destroyed the seemingly up and coming African American demographic with a dangerously addictive drug.

Finally, we have today. Things haven't changed, African Americans are really at the mercy of "White" America as it slowly rears its ugly head with Trump in charge.

All in all, I am observing "Neo-Apartheid", except now it's not about drugs to go after and disrupt, it's through economic exclusion, forcing people on the fringes to finally turn to criminal activities and nailing them to private prisons. Studies have shown if you incarcerate a family member, it spreads almost like an infection.

This all sounds ominous and negative but I do feel there is a very strong liberal voice for justice, and articles like this that uncover inconvenient truths seem on the rise, perhaps giving hope....but the cynic in me says the economic gap is just too wide...the communal infrastructure is broken in the ghettos that spiral into drug economies. You will see a few rising stars as "model minority"...like giving out fucking gold stars in kindergarten

I don't know I'm sickened by the systematic level in which the pigment in your skin should determine your level of economic participation, often reinforced through stereotypes that arose out of previous generations.

> 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

[edited to add, looks like $8,893 per kit, from 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-s...) but I suspect that's a pretty good return on investment if you want to donate to a US charity.]

I 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

I'm not exactly sure what the meaning of the $8000 savings statistic on the page you linked refers to.

Thanks - my bad. That's more like what I would have guessed.

I think you misunderstood the $8893, which is how much was saved by testing the kits in Cleveland.

Something 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.)

> 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.

Definitely. 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

We're talking about a place that struggles to have a functional response to murder and fire.

But, it's not just a problem with Detroit. It seems to be an issue everywhere.

http://www.endthebacklog.org/ending-backlog/state-responses

I 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.

Communities all over America are struggling to provide basic services. Detroit is an extreme case, but it isn't an edge case.

It tends to be hard to prosecute; regardless of what the results from the kits are many of them won’t go forward. So, if the prosecutor is solely concerned with numbers of convictions, as some are, then they may very well treat this as low priority and concentrate on crimes where conviction is easier.

This isn’t the way it should be, of course, but it’s what can happen given bad incentives.

Considering how much the USA spends in weapons - both for its own campaigns around the world and donations to “friends” - it’s somewhat ridiculous that the countries’ state cannot scrape enough pocket change to contain delinquency and protect its own citizens at home

The first thing makes money, the second just improves lives. Guess which is a priority in the halls of power?

Things would be different if there were more women in positions of power. Participation and representation are everything.

I 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.

There's so much more money and excitement to be gained in fighting the drug "menace" it's no wonder actual violent crimes were ignored.

Yes 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.

I am pretty sure the fact that the drug "war" can't be won is part of its appeal.

My 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)

An 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-r...

The 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

> 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.

Notice 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.

How 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.

> 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.

In 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).

>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

Population: 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.

These 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.

This is the county that contains Detroit, once the largest city in the US. And still quite large, despite the attrition.

> 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.

It 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_...

Perhaps you could use Wikipedia to satisfy your curiosity

I'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)

Only 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

That remark was not snide... I found it informative, I had no idea Wikipedia had "Demographic history of" pages.

This is nitpicking. The point is, Wayne county has a really really large population — this isn't some random rural county.

I'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.

Edit: 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.)

Insane. 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.

Based 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?

It'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).

Sex 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.

Not 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.

I 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.

It'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.

I was aware of that when making the comment. I still find it surprising, though. The statistics are just much higher than I expected, even for Detroit.

I'd bet most of the serial rapists are also known to their victims. In other words Tinder not trench coats. (Supposition)

Important to get that data so the media don't start parents panicking.

I have a young daughter and information like this kind of terrifies me.

Teach your child that hugs and kisses require mutual consent. Teach her it is her choice and kissing someone once does not obligate her to future kisses. Tell her if someone disrespects her no to come get a parent. Tell friends and relatives of yours no for her if they try to insist she is obligated to give hugs and kisses.

Being dragged off into a dark alley by a total stranger is the rare exception. Sexual assault almost always begins with boundary violation and disrespect and eventually culminates in rape. A child (or woman) who won't accept disrespect and who feels empowered to have a cow at the rudeness stage is at low risk.

I hear most perpetrators of sexual assault are men, shouldn’t your advice be more effective at prevention/avoidance if directed at sons instead?

I would like to see all children get the message. I certainly raised my two adult sons exactly like that.

The problem with your theory is that it is incredibly disempowering for women. I see this over and over and over. Everyone wants to cure "rape culture" for just one half of the equation. I don't think that works.

Look at the allegations made against Harvey Weinstein and Louis CK. Many of these women wanted to say no, but didn't feel able to.

Teaching young men to respect the boundaries of women is clearly important, but we also need to give young women the confidence and skills to assert their boundaries.

It would also really help if people who aren't rapey bastards would step forward and open doors for women in terms of career instead of looking the other way, worrying that if they give a woman a leg up professionally there will be talk etc. That would do a lot to reduce the power that men like Harvey Weinstein wield. When that isn't done, women wind up with no one to negotiate with other than men who expect them to pay for their career advancement on their back.

If anyone needs a little insight on the matter, I will suggest reading Salma Hayek's testimony about Harvey Weinstein:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/13/opinion/contr...

I think we should try it? Teaching daughters to be responsible for not getting sexually assaulyed implicitly communicates that men are not responsible. It can easily be interpreted as victim-blaming.

Can you elaborate about how teaching sons not to sexually assault people is disempowering to women? I need help understanding female empowerment.

Teaching daughters to be responsible for not getting sexually assaulted implicitly communicates that men are not responsible. It can easily be interpreted as victim-blaming.

That view grows out of our current mental models. Those mental models are the crux of the problem. Protecting yourself from criminal intent in no way absolves the criminal of guilt.

We don't draw that conclusion about any other crime. We don't tell people that thieves are not guilty of a crime if you failed to lock your house. We still encourage people to lock up to protect themselves from robbers while not thinking this somehow makes it your fault if the house gets broken into.

If you run into a bear in the woods and you run from it, it will incite the bear's chase instinct and get you mauled. Teaching people best practices for how to reduce the odds of getting mauled if they run into a bear is not saying it is their fault. Refusing to teach them how to effectively handle it because girls shouldn't know such things means girls will either not go out into the world or they will routinely get mauled. Both of those outcomes are harmful to the lives of girls. Neither one gives girls full lives end par with the guys.

There will always be predators. You will never achieve a perfect world. Not arming women to cope effectively with that reality essentially dooms them to sooner or later get preyed upon.

It also actively teaches them to be prey. But that's a nuanced discussion you are probably not ready for and I am not super awake either, so not really up for anything that challenging.

I get that you should be reasonably prepared for calamitous events. I don’t get the disempowering part, nor do I feel like it’s ok to just tell daughters (I know you didn’t say that, but likewise you haven’t addressed how prevention be best discussed with sons rather than avoidance with daughters). Perhaps they are related and I’m unaware of the connection.

I don’t need a complete explanation; I’m happy to get myself educated from an appropriate source.

There's this:

http://www.girlscouts.org/en/raising-girls/happy-and-healthy...

You might find it useful to google for enthusiastic consent and sex positive resources as well.

But you are the one coming up with this idea that it should be discussed with one gender or the other. I raised my sons this way. My original remarks were aimed at someone with a daughter, but there is no position here on my side to choose only one gender to educate.

I would like this to be a new cultural standard across the board. If you want to stamp out rape culture, then we need a new culture. This includes everyone, not one gender or the other.

The idea that it should be all on men to make sure sex goes well is rooted in current concepts of gender and heterosexual norms that actively train girls to be reactive, not proactive. It is rooted in a patriarchal framing of the world. This framing is inherently incompatible with female empowerment.

What if I want to ask? What then? How does your concept of focusing on men help there?

The other thing is that putting it on men amounts to assuming guilt. This never goes good places. There is a reason the US legal standard starts with an assumption of innocence. Warning men they need to not be rapey bastards begins with this assumption that there is a very big chance that they will do something terrible if they aren't berated from the get go.

What if we treat both men and women like people who likely need to politely negotiate a mutually acceptable arrangement to get their needs met? That negotiation process requires substantive communication about the matter, but it isn't inherently predatory -- unless we make it so culturally, as we currently tend to do.

> But you are the one coming up with this idea that it should be discussed with one gender or the other.

To be clear: I'm asking you why you're not recommending this be discussed with sons first. I thought it was weird you mentioned educating daughter and didn't mention sons.

> The idea that it should be all on men to make sure sex goes well is rooted in current concepts of gender and heterosexual norms that actively train girls to be reactive, not proactive. It is rooted in a patriarchal framing of the world. This framing is inherently incompatible with female empowerment.

OK, I see. Though I think that you can encourage women to be sexual empowered & and men to avoid sexual assault.

> The other thing is that putting it on men amounts to assuming guilt

I don't understand this in the slightest. It sounds 100% like victim blaming.

> What if we treat both men and women like people who likely need to politely negotiate a mutually acceptable arrangement to get their needs met?

What if I have some advantage over you? Physical, economic, a weapon? There can't be a fair agreement if one side can threaten the other, even if that side is unaware of their advantage.

I thought it was weird you mentioned educating daughter and didn't mention sons.

I was speaking to a specific individual about educating their own child. That child happens to be a daughter. That's it. You are entirely fabricating this idea that I was talking about the need to educate girls, but not boys.

My very first sentence is gender neutral:

Teach your child that hugs and kisses require mutual consent.

I only switched to female pronouns after that because I was addressing a specific person who had specified the gender of their own child. That first sentence stands well on its own for speaking to any parent, regardless of the gender of their child. It was intentionally framed that way because the message is gender neutral on purpose.

There can't be a fair agreement if one side can threaten the other, even if that side is unaware of their advantage.

Therein lies your problem. You fundamentally see men as predators and women as prey.

This is an issue that isn't going to be resolved via some internet conversation. I could talk at you until I am blue in the face, you would continue to not understand, continue to accuse me of victim blaming etc.

Most likely, there is no point in investing more of my time in this discussion. There can be no meeting of the minds here.

> You are entirely fabricating this idea that I was talking about the need to educate girls, but not boys.

I would understand your position better if you said, "I would always recommend that we discuss this with sons first, and teach them how their actions enable sexual assault, even indirectly". I think that's not your position though…

Indeed. I fundamentally think that men and women do not have an equal footing in society & that the balance of power is weighted heavily in favour of men. I feel like you want to avoid calling out this unfairness and loudly recommending that men help redress the imbalance by changing their behaviour & calling out disempowering behaviour in others.

I see you are very comfortable in your position; I am new to mine and it's a learning experience.

No, it is not my position.

Children are born innocent. Hanging societal crap on male children for the crime of being born male only perpetuates societal crap. Male children who don't yet even have a sexuality should not be getting the message right out the gate that "We know you are basically a rapey bastard, hell bent on taking advantage of women. So we feel a strong need to inculcate you with brainwashing to the contrary to try to mitigate your inherently evil nature."

Yes, I am aware that men have a lot of money and power in the world that can constitute an unfair advantage. I am doing what I can to redress that. But, among other things, starting with the assumption that boys will always have an advantage perpetuates the problem.

You may never agree with me. Even if you eventually do, that day is probably not coming any time soon. Investing more time in basically arguing with you probably does neither of us any good at all.

I would appreciate it if you just drop this. I don't think this is productive.

With 25 serial rapists a year, how many sons are born each year (assuming all of them are male).

Out of those 25, how many should be seen a clinical sane and would had their behavior changed if they just got the right advice as a child?

Giving advice to "all boys" or "all girls" seems like one of those things that make people feel like they are doing something but which will have zero impact. Rape is one of those crimes which you could double the punishment for and still not see any change in the crime rate, as if it was done by less rational and rather sick minds.

Perpetrators of all crimes are mostly men. Sexual assault perpetrated by men isn't out of proportion with theft or murder perpetrated by men.

I feel like your comment was trying to make a point and ended up stating some trivial facts. Could you elaborate on what your point is?

Perhaps it's too nihilistic a point to make at this juncture but it goes like this:

How are we doing at reducing all instances of crime among men? If we can't get people to stop stealing, what hope do we have to convince them not to harass and assault? I just don't buy the standard argument "teach men not to rape". How do we do that? It's not a simple matter of saying "rape is bad, okay?"

What we're dealing with here are tremendous forces of poverty, social atomization, and alienation. People who feel like they are on the outside looking in often have no problem ignoring the rules which really exist only to protect insiders anyway.

I appreciate the reply, and I agree with your point.

And that's those caught. From those rapes where women decided to report and get a rape kit done.

>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.

"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."

Serial 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-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.

Why don't women go to the police more often when they're raped? Sure is a mystery.

It 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.

I think the OP was being sarcastic.

Heh, in reconsidering the context I have to agree. The question comes up in every discussion of the topic so I overlooked it.

My 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.

> 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.

What 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?

http://victimsofcrime.org/our-programs/dna-resource-center/u...

I have done a little googling. I cannot come up with data on what percentage of rape kits are anonymous -- on the other hand, Wikipedia says: Conservative estimates indicate there are 200,000–400,000 untested SAKs in U.S. police departments

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_kit

Anyway, if someone can come up with data as to what percentage are anonymous, I am curious.

It 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.

Having 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.

Would 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.

> 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.

Were 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.

If 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.

Is there any documented case of this?

I 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.

Here's one where an armrest of a chair was swabbed at the police station.

https://www.policeone.com/legal/articles/8691418-How-surrept...

Yes, "serial" means "repeat" in this context.

Specifically, TFA said that they defined "serial rapist" as those who raped 10-15 times without being caught.

The 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/...

Thank you for that correction, that's indeed very different and it's a shame the reporting is so sloppy

You don't have to be in a database before for your DNA in one rape kit to be identified as being (nearly certainly) from the same person as your DNA in 9+ other rape kits.

The article does say they have gone on to arrest 127 people, so presumably they were also able to identify the perpetrator from the DNA (or the testimony of the victim).

Right, but that doesn't mean the other 670+ of the 800 serial rapists were identified against another database or way of identifying the individual besides “the same individual as indicated in these other rape kits”.

Quite possibly some of the rape kits also included files where the victim said “Joe did it” but wasn’t believed at the time. Now when Joe’s DNA is found in a bunch of other rape kits where the perpetrator was unidentified, the picture of our friend Joe gets a bit clearer...

Assuming 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.

> 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-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?

There 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.

Kym Worthy 2020. She has my vote. Amazing story.

Take 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.

It says they were found in 2009. I wonder what period they were from then?

"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/...

Someone besides the rapists deserve lengthy jail time.

How about both?

s/besides/in addition to/g

When are we going to separate prosecution so that a non-govermental agency could get access to these and perform the prosecution themselves?

A rapist rapes on average seven to 11 times before they're caught.

Is this an illness?

Absolutely inexcusable.

Actual source article:

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.

Thanks! We've updated the link from https://boingboing.net/2017/12/18/11341-abandoned-rape-kits-....

> 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.

FYI 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

Wayne County is only 40% and this goes back as far as '84 when Detroit City was less than 75%

Does 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.

Pray tell, what's a "rape kit"? I assume it's not a kit that makes raping someone easier...

From 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

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.

It'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

You can do better than that. Please don't post like this to HN.

Sensitive 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.

Can 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.

>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?

Not when 82% of the population are African American.

The county is only 40% black. 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... It wasn't always 80% black.

Very good points. Thank you.

They're actually terrible points, which are very shallow and not pertinent to the situation

But you wouldn't expect the rapes to be randomly distributed. Wayne County is a tale of two cities. There are rich white suburbs and the poor, black city.

You have to compare the untest kits to the demographics of record victims. It's likely women of color are much more often victims of rape. That is the trend nationwide.

The kits are from a Detroit Police warehouse. The rest of Wayne county has different police forces.

The oldest kit was from 1984, not all the kits.

Your Wikipedia chart shows Detroit has been at least 80% non-white since 1990.

The point is that this is a city with a large majority of blacks, and it just so happens to have terrible police. That isn't a contingent circumstance.

Anyone with any money left as soon as possible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_Detroit#/media/File... Since Detroit has a storied history of racism, most of the poor people who have remained are black. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Detroit... The state of public services is bad because there is no money left, not because the place is full of black people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_Detroit#/media/File...

Everyone with money left well before 1990, the vast majority of white flight took place in the 60s, 70s, and 80s

Edit sp332, lol yes 2/3 of the white population remaining in 1990 left after that, the problem with your line of thinking is 86% of the white population had already fled by 1990. 2/3 of 14% is not much...

2/3 of the white population in 1990 has now left. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Detroit...

Edit: ok so I don't see where we're disagreeing.

Because Detroit was less than 8% white non-Hispanic in the 2010 census? Honestly sounds like white women are overrepresented in this sample.

No, the demographics of the city are similar. So, no racial component to the victims. For the suspects or judicial system, perhaps.

There is a strong racial component everywhere. However a grown up person already knows what to expect from mostly black-populated city. White people leave such area for a reason. No one need to explain and give its own ideas about it. We all know what government wants us to hear and we all know what the real truth is. So skip to the point - give the facts and let us make conclusions ourselve.

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