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.
Abandoned rape kits identify over 800 serial rapists in one Michigan county
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Re: Abandoned rape kits identify over 800 serial rapists in one Michigan county
#42My 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 blu…
> 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.
Re: Abandoned rape kits identify over 800 serial rapists in one Michigan county
#43Can 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?
Re: Abandoned rape kits identify over 800 serial rapists in one Michigan county
#44Were 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?
Re: Abandoned rape kits identify over 800 serial rapists in one Michigan county
#45It 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/...
Re: Abandoned rape kits identify over 800 serial rapists in one Michigan county
#46How 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.
Re: Abandoned rape kits identify over 800 serial rapists in one Michigan county
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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)
Re: Abandoned rape kits identify over 800 serial rapists in one Michigan county
#48Why 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.
Re: Abandoned rape kits identify over 800 serial rapists in one Michigan county
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Re: Abandoned rape kits identify over 800 serial rapists in one Michigan county
#50Actual 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-....