UNO Researchers Analyzing Sexual Assault Kit Data
Researchers from the University of Nebraska-Omaha’s School of Criminology and Criminal Justice have partnered with the Minnesota Bureau of Justice to analyze data from sexual assault kits that have gone untested for years that are being tested as part of the Minnesota Sexual Assault Kit Initiative.
The National Institute of Justice awarded about $658,000 to UNO researchers Tara Richards, Justin Nix and Emily Wright, as well as Bradley Campbell of the University of Louisville, to evaluate processes and outcomes of Minnesota’s Sexual Assault Kit Initiative.
“We have money from the National Institute of Justice to help them evaluate their project, to really make sure that, to help them make sure they’re meeting the goals of the project, and to put all the data together, because they want to understand, ‘What were the characteristics of all these kits that didn’t get tested?’” Richards said in an interview with The Daily Record. “There are hundreds of thousands of previously unsubmitted sexual assault kits in jurisdictions all over the country, for a lot of reasons. Mostly because, for decades, there was just not legislation that required all sexual assault kits to be tested, so law enforcement had to make decisions about where to use resources.”
That lack of resources is responsible for many of the untested sexual assault kits that are in storage across the country, Richards said.
“There’s been a big movement in the last decade or so to test all the sexual assault kits that are in storage across the United States,” Richards said. “As part of that, the federal government has devoted millions of dollars — this started under the Obama administration — to support jurisdictions to do that, to actually support them with financial resources to test these kits, to supporting the crime lab, to hiring additional victims’ service professionals and dedicated law enforcement investigators to attend to the potential cases that would come out of these previously untested kits.”
As of 2019, more than 100,000 sexual assault kits remained untested nationwide, according to advocacy group End the Backlog. The group reports that Minnesota police agencies had about 5,000 untested sexual assault kits. A 2015 audit found nearly 3,500 untested sexual assault kits statewide — a number that grew sharply when the Minneapolis Police Department announced in 2019 that it had nearly 1,500 more cases than it initially reported in the audit.
In addition to potentially aiding in the investigations the kits are associated with, DNA taken from the sexual assault kits could also be useful in identifying suspects in other cases.
“Our thinking has changed in terms of the value of these sexual assault kits,” Richards said. “Because they may not necessarily add anything to the case that they’re associated with, but they could bring information and evidence on another case, and that wasn’t something that we really understood 10 years ago.”
Minnesota’s initiative was founded with the goals of testing previously unsubmitted sexual assault kits, building capacity for criminal justice agencies to move cases forward with investigating leads to prosecuting cases based on testing, providing victim advocacy and support, and identifying the cost-benefit of testing efforts.
This NIJ-funded study will examine the initiative’s success in reaching these goals, the processes it uses to reach these goals, and the cost-benefit of the funds invested to test, investigate, and prosecute untested sexual assault kits in Minnesota relative to the potential costs savings of preventing future crimes through testing these kits.
“What we want to do is help them collect the types of data and evaluate those outcomes, things that they may not be able to understand without having a research partner, because we want them to do their jobs,” Richards said. “We want them to have the time to serve victims and investigate cases and test kits and not worry about collecting data and analyzing data.”
The project began in March and will be funded for three years.
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