11,000 rape kits found in Detroit

[das_nut]

The Prosecutor's Office says 11,000 rape kits have been found sitting on the shelves at a police annex building. Most of the kits were untested, until now.

Prosecutor Kym Worthy said the untested kits were found in 2009. Since then, her office has been sending the kits out in waves as they try to catch up. About 400 have been tested so far. Worthy said the amount of rape cases are sadly stacking up.

"The first 200 in wave one were stranger rapes where the victim did not know the attacker," she said. "And we have been able to identify, so far, in total, 21 serial rapists."

- Full story.

I'm not sure what's more disturbing:

1. Detroit managed to misplace 11,000 rape kits, most untested.
2. 21 serial rapists are presumably still on the streets.
3. Since the kits were found in 2009, roughly 3 years ago, only 400 have been tested. At this rate, some rapists will die of old age before the kits are tested.

What the hell, Detroit?

 

[mlp]

I don't think the situation in Detroit is that much of an outlier.

Here's another sad instance: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/23/u...le-with-high-rate-of-rape.html?pagewanted=all

 

[K-II]

The difficulties facing American Indian women who have been raped are myriad, and include a shortage of sexual assault kits at Indian Health Service hospitals, where there is also a lack of access to birth control and sexually transmitted disease testing. There are also too few nurses trained to perform rape examinations, which are generally necessary to bring cases to trial.
Women say the tribal police often discourage them from reporting sexual assaults, and Indian Health Service hospitals complain they lack cameras to document injuries.

...

The Indian Health Service, for instance, provides exams for rape victims at only 27 of the 45 hospitals it finances and, according to a federal report in 2011, did not keep adequate track of the number of sexual assault victims its facilities treat and lacked an overall policy for treating rape victims. Additionally, the health service has just 73 trained sexual assault examiners.

Let's try this another way for the sake of brevity... what do they have?