Whatever the reason, these stats are disgusting and this should never happen.
If I had to pick a reason why rape kits went untested, I would lean towards money as the primary reason and a belief that it would yield no evidence being number two.
Obviously, I plan to explain. To test one rape kit, it cost between $1500 to $2500. That is a chunk of change. As per my second reason, say you have a rape victim who is raped, goes home and showers and washes her clothes, and reports the rape days later. She still gets the rape kit, but if her attacker used a condom, the odds of finding any useful dna is pretty much zero. So $1500 for a test that will almost certainly yield nothing gives one pause.
I take sexual assault very seriously, as I teach rape prevention and women’s self defense. I also take resorts and read all reports of rapes. Some of those cases could be called “thin” to be generous. Some of them you know to be false, or the victim comes in and says she wishes to recant her report. Crazy as that sounds, it happens.
The cases that are “real” are heartbreaking, and you want to find or convict her attacker very much. But I remember one case where a woman claimed her attacker( a small man of about 120 lbs) knocked her out and carried her three blocks to the rape location. This was said to have occurred in broad daylight. We later learned this woman was mentally ill, and was known to do this where she was from, but she filed three reports before we realized what was going on. How is that possible? She spoke to different officers, and no one would dare call a potential rape victim a liar.
I also took a report where a woman was the center of a gang bang. She was willing and was even the aggressor. While she was sucking one guy off, another was plugging away. When he finished, another would step in. This went on for some time until she took a break from chugging penis to see that someone had penetrated her that she did not like and she came in to file rape charges the next day. At least she did not shower and had her clothes, but she had the dna of half the city on her and the rape kits took up a city block. If I recall, the guy was black, which is where the problem came in. But I could not help thinking that this woman, who had sexual with over a dozen men, would say she was raped. She did not tell the guy “no” but she said she did not give him permission and she was “drying up” yet she had about three more after that guy. This case was a lot of wasted resources and news story.
Anyway, there should never be a large backlog of untested rape kits, but if there is little chance of finding anything, the prosecutor’s office may say “don’t test that one” and it is a financial issue.
Oh, and to test all the rape kits in this story would cost 17 million dollars at the low end. So that should answer some questions, but the prosecutor(big kudos to her for her work and being way ahead of the curve in this issue) also has a point that most of those rape kits were minority victims. So there may be more to those untested kits.
My department has zero untested kits, btw.