Pray tell, what's a "rape kit"? I assume it's not a kit that makes raping someone easier...
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
#22Pray 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."
Re: Abandoned rape kits identify over 800 serial rapists in one Michigan county
#23Pray tell, what's a "rape kit"? I assume it's not a kit that makes raping someone easier...
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.
Re: Abandoned rape kits identify over 800 serial rapists in one Michigan county
#24Pray tell, what's a "rape kit"? I assume it's not a kit that makes raping someone easier...
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.
Re: Abandoned rape kits identify over 800 serial rapists in one Michigan county
#25>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
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.
Re: Abandoned rape kits identify over 800 serial rapists in one Michigan county
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
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”.
Re: Abandoned rape kits identify over 800 serial rapists in one Michigan county
#27The 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-...
Re: Abandoned rape kits identify over 800 serial rapists in one Michigan county
#28My 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)
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
Re: Abandoned rape kits identify over 800 serial rapists in one Michigan county
#29Were 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.
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/...
Re: Abandoned rape kits identify over 800 serial rapists in one Michigan county
#30My 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.