Lawmakers in Washington have decided it’s not enough to simply require that evidence from rape victims be submitted for testing.
They now want to track those exam results every step of the way, from hospital to laboratory to police station.
A bill approved by the Legislature last week would create a statewide tracking system for sexual assault forensic exams, commonly known as “rape kits.”
Supporters say the bill will enable rape survivors to keep track of what’s happening in their cases, while pinpointing problems that have caused an estimated 6,000 rape kits to go untested in Washington.
“I would assume a lot of the 6,000 victims thought their kits were tested,” said state Rep. Tina Orwall, D-Des Moines. “They didn’t know they were sitting on a shelf. So now, they’ll know.”
The new rape-kit tracking system will use bar codes on every rape kit to “actually allow us to track it through every step of the process,” said Orwall, who sponsored House Bill 2530.
Supporters say the measure, which has been sent to Gov. Jay Inslee, will make Washington the first state to implement a rape-kit tracking system statewide.
The bill says all agencies involved with handling rape kits must participate in the tracking system by June 1, 2018.
“I have not heard of a tracking system enacted with such specificity in law,” Richard Williams, a criminal justice policy specialist with the National Conference of State Legislatures, said in an email last week.
Rape kits contain swabs and other tools used to collect DNA samples and other evidence from rape victims. They are stocked by police departments and hospitals, and are intended for use immediately after a rape has occurred.
Police say that in the past many kits were not sent for testing if the victim knew his or her attacker, or if a suspect admitted to committing the crime. But the failure to submit those kits to a lab also prevented those suspects’ DNA from being entered in national DNA databases that could connect them to other cases.
Cities and states nationwide are now looking at ways to get older kits tested, as well as prevent kits from going untested in the future.
In Washington, the rape-kit tracking system is the second measure lawmakers have passed in two years aimed at preventing rape kits from sitting untested in police department evidence rooms.
