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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

#61

Post by [deleted] »

jstarfish wrote: post #48
keevie wrote: post #38

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 tha…

[deleted]

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

#62

Post by jessaustin »

gumby wrote: post #19

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.

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

#63

Post by MadAnthonyWayne »

Avshalom wrote: post #52
MadAnthonyWayne wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#64

Post by wavefunction »

danielvf wrote: post #27

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…

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...

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

#65

Post by astura »

MadAnthonyWayne wrote: post #49
richardwhiuk wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

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

#66

Post by theptip »

> 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.]

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

#67

Post by grasshopperpurp »

Kalium wrote: post #60
jrs95 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

#68

Post by shkkmo »

> 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.

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

#69

Post by sp332 »

pavon wrote: post #53
Falling3 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

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

#70

Post by jessaustin »

pavon wrote: post #53
Falling3 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 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.
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