Advocates: Clearing of SDPD sexual assault evidence kit backlog good for public safety, closure for survivors

Last week, the San Diego Police Department announced it has no backlog of untested sexual-assault evidence kits for the first time since 2019.

Why it matters

The accomplishment puts the department in compliance with California Senate Bill 22 from 2019, which required law enforcement agencies across the state to conduct more timely DNA analyses of sexual-assault forensic evidence.

Some advocates for survivors said the clearing of the backlog can bring closure for some survivors and lead to improvements in public safety.

Cori Austin, the CEO of Center for Community Solutions San Diego, said going through the process of collecting a rape kit can be traumatic for survivors. CCSSD has advocates that accompany survivors through the exam at hospitals.

“The significance of having the rape kits tested on a timely basis validates the victims' experience, lets them know that it wasn't in vain to go through that kind of an exam,” Austin said.

She added that waiting to hear whether a kit has been tested can be anxiety inducing for a survivor.

“So once they're able to get feedback that the rape kit is in fact being tested, that there is criminal justice that they're looking into, that can be extremely healing for a survivor. For some of them, that can help them with closure,” Austin said.

But the impacts of clearing the backlog go even further.

“Anytime a backlog is addressed and kits are tested, it's very likely that there'll be some leads in those cases that come out of DNA testing,” said Ilse Knecht, policy and advocacy director of the Joyful Heart Foundation. “The evidence from the rape kit gets tested, it gets put into the DNA database, and that's where it could potentially match to offenders whose DNA is in the database from other crimes.”

A closer look

Knecht leads Joyful Heart’s End The Backlog campaign, which aims to identify untested rape kits across the country. In 2014, her organization discovered through a Freedom of Information Act that SDPD had 2,873 untested kits.

“At that time, it actually wasn't that unusual to find that many (untested) kits in a jurisdiction,” Knecht said. “That was when a lot of communities were coming out and saying, ‘Yeah, we have these kits too.’”

Knecht said she visited San Diego’s crime lab in 2018 as she continued to follow its progress.

In 2020, the agency turned to a contract laboratory, Bode Cellmark Forensics, to help clear the backlog of untested kits.

The work, according to SDPD officials, was divided into three phases:

• A total of 450 SB22-mandated kits from 2016-19. They were all tested by December 2021.
• Another 1,350 so-called "historical" kits dating from prior to 2016. They were tested by October 2024.
• An additional 873 kits from 2020-24. They were tested by November of last year.

Looking ahead

While Bode focused on the backlog, the SDPD laid the groundwork to bring all future testing in-house, according to SDPD Capt. Brent Williams. Between 2020 and 2024, the department invested in staffing, lab renovations and new equipment, while streamlining procedures to ensure that incoming kits could be processed efficiently and thoroughly, he said.

Due to those improvements, the SDPD Crime Lab now tests sex-assault forensic evidence significantly faster than before — averaging a 45-day turnaround, well ahead of the 145-day requirement set by SB22, Williams said.

"These kits play a critical role in identifying sexual-assault offenders, supporting prosecutions and delivering justice to survivors," the captain noted.

Knecht said outsourcing to a private lab is very common when cities try to clear a backlog. Bode, in particular, is the lab that many communities have hired to clear their backlogs.

Moving forward, Knecht said it matters in how survivors are alerted if there are updates to their cases thanks to the backlog clearance. Joyful Heart’s research into this didn’t yield just one real answer.

“But the common theme was ‘I just want to be given information and I want to have someone who's trained in trauma to talk to me about what I'm going through,’” Knecht said.