Polly Poskin, Executive Director of ICASA, shows an audience a rape kit. Photography by: José Moré/Chicago News Cooperative

Sarah Tofte: Polly, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me today. Let’s talk a bit about how you got interested in working on violence against women issues.

Polly Poskin: In college, I focused on women’s history for my graduate degree. That was a time when we were learning about the women’s movement. So much of the focus was improving access to education, improving employment opportunities and expanding daycare. And we got into reproductive rights. Our women’s movement focused on educational opportunities for women, equal pay, child-bearing and child-caring issues and the right of a woman to control her body. We never talked about domestic violence and rape. I wasn’t aware of those issues in 1970.

ST: So, when did violence against women come into your work?

PP: I remember the New York Radical Feminists held a “Speak Out” on rape in New York City in 1971. I came to understand that if women were to gain equality and be free to move about safely in this culture, we were going to have to have sexual safety. If women were to feel liberated, they needed to be safe. And I realized that if we don’t end violence in women’s lives, women were never going to be safe, free and even remotely equal to men in all the areas of life that we might like to pursue.

ST: Once you decided to commit yourself to this work, where did you go?

PP: The opportunities were not huge. There were rape crisis centers and domestic violence shelters, but there was no funding for them. Then, in 1980, President Reagan signed into law the rape crisis services and rape prevention program that contained federal funds designated for rape crisis centers. That helped open up the field for more people to be employed, including me.

ST: Tell me about the early days of your work on sexual violence. What were the challenges?

PP: Well, if we didn’t have bona fide physical evidence that could somehow substantiate the woman’s report of rape, then there was going to be no support for–and no response to–a rape victim by law enforcement and the criminal justice system. In the early days of my work, many of the women coming forward were sexually abused as children or as young teenagers and, now, decades later, were coming forward to get help from us and to tell us what had happened to them. As there became more permission for women to report rape and as women realized they could get the support of victim advocates and have some community back-up, more women came forward in the immediate moments after a rape. There was growing focus on what physical evidence existed in order to go forward with a case. Women began to believe they could report a rape right after it happened when there would still be physical evidence that could be used at trial.

ST: I have been doing some research lately on the origins of rape kit examinations in the United States and I learned that Illinois is considered the birthplace of the rape kit. Was it around this time that the rape kit started to emerge as a good law enforcement tool?

PP: A victim’s rights advocate helped develop the kit with a detective in or around 1975-1976. Before the rape kit existed, there was very little physical evidence collected from rape cases—or, if it was collected, it was not always as useful as it needed to be. There were storage issues and contamination issues and inconsistency in analysis. It was a bit of a mess.

The importance of the rape kit rose as reporting rates increased and more victims came forward right after a rape occurred. In the mid 80s, an investigative reporter in Chicago discovered that police were hoarding rape kits in the trunks of police officers’ cars. The kits never even made it to the police station. These kits had been collected and because there was never any pursuit of the investigation, the officers never took the kits to the station or the lab. That story opened the floodgates to talk about the significance of rape kits, the lack of law enforcement compliance in delivering the kits to the lab and the role of state’s attorneys’ offices who too infrequently requested lab results from the kits.

Since the first rape kit was introduced, we have constantly made tweaks and improvements as our knowledge base increases about what works and what doesn’t for victims and for evidentiary value. We worked hard to improve the emergency room response by doing training with hospitals and law enforcement. We tried to bridge the relationship between cops and hospitals so they would communicate better with one another.

ST: Why was the forensic piece so important to get right?

PP: As to the crime of rape, our society does not believe women simply based on their word. So, especially in those years before the rape laws were changed, we really, really needed corroborating physical evidence in order to get a prosecutor to take the case. We needed to have evidence to substantiate the woman’s testimony of what happened to her because, unfortunately, her word alone was not enough. The reality was we needed evidence to bolster a woman’s credibility that she was telling the truth about the rape. Quite honestly, so much of making a criminal case depended on the emergency room personnel who documented the victim’s condition when she came in—the bruises, the broken bones. All of this was in addition to the rape kit collection, and together, it lent credibility to the woman’s story. And in cases when a victim was afraid to tell anyone about the abuse, effective and compassionate care in the emergency room helped to encourage the victim to report the crime. Forensic evidence also made it more difficult for the police to deny that the abuse occurred.

ST: I recently read that of the 4,100 untested rape kits in Illinois police storage facilities, the oldest one was from 1978. Would you talk about the difference between what a woman reporting in 1978 and having a rape kit collected would experience and what a woman today experiences?

PP: In 1978, a victim would be fortunate if she got herself to an emergency room. It wasn’t as widely known that a woman could get help, so it was even more rare then for a woman to come forward to report the crime or get medical help. The process of the rape kit exam was, and continues to be, a pretty arduous experience, although that has certainly improved through sexual assault nurse examiners who are trained to do the exam as efficiently and compassionately as possible. Thirty years ago, many women went to the ER to get care because of a fear of pregnancy and many of them didn’t even necessarily want to report rape to police. The cultural bias against rape victims told a victim that she was probably not going to get the support she needed and that the assailant would never be apprehended. There was very little incentive to report rape. A woman went to ERs for care, not for evidence collection, so the woman getting a rape kit collected in 1978 was especially brave.

Also, back in 1978, we didn’t have as much information about the prevalence of rape. There was no data. It wasn’t until Illinois required emergency rooms to report to law enforcement that a victim had presented to the hospital for a rape (leaving out the victim’s name or address). And then we required law enforcement to publicly report the number of rapes reported to them. In areas where law enforcement developed a good relationship with emergency rooms, police would start to come to the emergency room to gather information from the victim and about the assailant. It gave police the opportunity to witness firsthand the severity of the assault.  Some police continued to use the ER visit as a time to determine if they believed the victim. It was so important as this practice developed to make certain that victim advocates were present to serve as a buffer of protection for the victim and work with law enforcement and emergency room personnel on her behalf.

Back in 1978, the definition of rape was very narrow. The victim had to be 14 or older, could not be the assailant’s spouse and the sex had to be sexual penetration by force. This narrow definition of rape in the law told the victim that if she did not meet the law’s definition of rape, then she was not a rape victim.

As we started to get some data on the prevalence of rape and how many different types of rape that were beyond the law’s definition of rape, we started to focus on how to get the law to better address the broad spectrum of rape.

ST: How do you think it helped to have an improved emergency room response?

PP: It helped get victims the care they needed to put their life back together again. It is my belief that victims need an immediate sense of recovery in order to reestablish their lives. I think that when we get an institution to respond well to the crime of rape, it’s useful in responding to the victim, but it also helps to address the impact of the crime on the community and helps preserve the physical and emotional integrity of the victim. And we cannot underestimate the role the advocate plays at the emergency room as she brings compassion and care to the victim during what are probably some of the worst moments of her life.

ST: And how has this improved training empowered victims?

PP: Hospitals and law enforcement now know that rape victims get to determine their care and the direction that care takes and that victims are free to determine how much care they want. This lets victims know that they are taking control of their lives and the process following rape; they are then better prepared to be a witness and better prepared to be a critical part of the criminal case. When professional care improves, victims want to be more engaged in the system.

ST: There are so many aspects to an improved criminal justice response. Let’s talk for a moment specifically about DNA and how that is useful in moving more cases forward.

PP: We think of DNA as being most useful when the assailant is a stranger, at least in terms of solving that individual case. And that is probably true. But I think that if you are not testing all rape kits–even in non-stranger cases–and not gathering the evidence that those kits provide, then you are dismissing what can be the most critical factor in the jury’s opinion. The more physical evidence and scientific evidence you provide them, the more useful it is. And it is incredibly helpful in interrupting the rape from occurring again, especially since serial rapists are often non-stranger rapists as well as stranger rapists. So I think it’s essential that we make sure that we are using all the tools we have to hold offenders accountable and DNA is a huge part in doing so.

I believe Illinois is making huge strides in terms of rape kit testing—and a lot of those strides happened because of the courage of victims to come forward and say, “I don’t think my rape kit was tested.” Everyone has to follow the law and we have a new law that says we need to collect rape kit evidence and that the evidence will be tested. You cannot have untested or unaccounted rape kits anymore in this state without now breaking the law. So, by mandating by law that every rape kit is tested, it sends the message that rape kit testing is serious—so serious there is a law mandating it—and that we take rape seriously. It is that kind of adherence to the law that creates a cultural understanding that this is serious, violent behavior and we are taking it seriously and we will handle testing with the utmost responsibility.

When people see that discretionary decisions are being made case by case regarding rape kit testing, or when testing is based on an individual police officer’s subjective beliefs about the case, then people see that it’s arbitrary, that it isn’t law at all, it’s based on whoever is in charge of the particular case or incident. That is a message to rape victims that, “this is not going to go well for me if I report. It’s going to be arbitrary about whether I am believed or not and I don’t know if reporting is worth it.” Institutions have a responsibility to provide standardization, uniformity, fairness and consistency in their responsibilities and once that is undermined and certain people are given passes and excuses, faith in those institutions is diminished.

ST: Let’s go back to the rape kit backlog. Talk to me about the latest developments in Illinois.

PP: There was a report just released by the Illinois State Police that found 4,100 untested kits inventoried in 379 different law enforcement agencies. Now that we have inventoried these kits, we know what we are dealing with in terms of our rape kit backlog. The best that is going to come out of this is that we will all collaborate and come to a common understanding that the implementation of law leads to successful investigations, increased safety of communities and hopefully justice for the victim.  We will start to see the value of stretching ourselves to create laws and implement laws that bring about justice and hopefully the prevention of rape.

I would like to think that the effort to end the rape kit backlog will result in a victim knowing that she or he will be believed and there is a system in place that will do its very best to bring justice to her or him. If, as a culture, we can ensure our citizens that if you reach out for help, you will be believed that you need help, and if we say to an assailant that they will be held accountable for violating someone’s sense of sexual safety, we will be more trusting of one another and our institutions.  Maybe then, we can live in community.

ST: What will it take to dramatically reduce—it not end altogether—sexual violence in this country?

PP: We certainly need increased funding, increased resources and laws requiring accountability, but that alone does not change a culture. It may keep us fortified with the resources that we need to be safe, but ending sexual violence is really dependent on human beings regarding one another as equals. Someone I regard as my equal I do not harm. If we had the practice of equality, we would see the end of rape. If we can move toward equality, we will start to see a decrease in rape.  We will see an increase in believing the victim and arresting the assailant and pursuing justice.  That practice brings dignity and rights back to women.

ST: What sticks with you the most about this work?

PP: I think a lot about the courage it takes to report rape. I think everyday about the victims who live with rape as a reference point in their lives. That is why I hold such deep respect and love for any woman under any circumstances who comes forward to report she was raped. Victims will live with the memory of rape, those who tell someone and are believed also build the positive memory of coming forward to seek support. We all must understand the impact of rape on an individual’s life and the significance that first responders have on a victim’s recovery.

Something I think about is how wonderful it would be to run after sundown, alone, during what would–I imagine—be a very meditative practice. But I don’t do it. And there is only one reason I don’t run after dark and that is the fear of rape. I see men after dark, running, in that same beautiful park and I would imagine it would feel serene and uplifting, but I don’t feel safe doing that. I want to live in a world where it is just as safe for a woman as a man to run after dark.

Wouldn’t it be lovely to know that whomever you meet, they would take care of you? That we would protect one another? Safety and freedom are integral, and dependent on one another.

]]> http://endthebacklog.org/blog/?feed=rss2&p=500 2 http://endthebacklog.org/blog/?p=342 http://endthebacklog.org/blog/?p=342#comments Tue, 08 Mar 2011 04:06:43 +0000 Sarah http://endthebacklog.org/blog/?p=342 This is last installment of my three-part interview with bestselling crime novelist, former Sex Crimes Unit chief prosecutor of the New York County District Attorney and advocate for rape kit reform, Linda Fairstein. Be sure to read the other two installments here and here.

Sarah Tofte: Back to the question of your career path and how you came to be a writer. What is it that gives you the ability to imagine the world to be different than it currently is?

Linda Fairstein: People always assume because I’ve done this work for so long that I must be a dark person. I’m very much an optimist, and I’m very upbeat. My work primarily is not with offenders and the bad guys and the perpetrators, it’s with people who’ve experienced the worst trauma you can have in a criminal setting. To be part of that solution in the early days and to this minute of being able to give them something, to know that there was a way to restore their dignity and to do it with compassion, that was what kept me there for a very long term.

Now when I went to college, my dream was to write–to become a writer–and I went to a college where Mary McCarthy and Edna St. Vincent Millay and these iconic women had gone. I realized by the end of my college career that was not happening for me and yet I never abandoned that dream, which is what I came back to much later. When I got to law school, although I knew I wanted the DA’s office, it didn’t occur to me until I got to that door for an interview that it wasn’t easy to do as a woman. I mean it was just mind-boggling to have somebody say, “young lady, you can’t go to court because they’re talking about blood and guts.”

I was just very fortunate to benefit from the feminist movement. People don’t often like to say that anymore, but really it was the feminists of the sixties who kicked those doors open a lot and I benefited. So that vision was supported by the Dean of the law school, who had recognized the passion that I had and supported me in it. People often say, “how did you have the fortitude to do it?” If I had been 10 years older and more mature, I think I would have never stayed to do it. But I had that optimism of youth, and there’s nothing you think you can’t do. I was as competent as these guys, and these guys gave me a chance. I got into it and just loved it and I did have the ideas to expand [on the reforms I was speaking to you about]. That was from the firsthand experience of having women sit with me in a room and tell their stories.

When I first got there I had to say, “here’s the law. This may be the ugliest thing you’ll ever hear in your life, but it’s your word alone. You could convict the same guy of robbery if you identified him in a lineup, but because you weren’t taken to a hospital or the hospital didn’t collect evidence, there’s no medical evidence that shows you were raped. He didn’t have the knife on his person last night, so that means the law thinks you consented. You’ll have to go home.”

I mean that was what literally happened with the first rape victims I met. So within a year, the laws changed and a lot was better already. I was the beneficiary of good luck, serendipitous timing and I had the right attitude. I fell in love with the work. I mean it’s an odd word, but it was so uplifting.

ST: Do you think that being an optimistic person can make you such a strong advocate for a victim?

LF: That was what I could use to carry a reluctant victim with me who would say, for example, “my sister was raped four years ago and the jury didn’t believe her.” I would think about how that was four years ago and with the law and science of four years ago. And this is what we have now. I would think, “boy, can I do something with this now.”

ST: What do you think when people come up to you at events or book signings and disclose to you that they are survivors?

LF: That is one thing that Mariska, through Olivia Benson, and I have in common. When I first met Mariska, she said that people were writing to her and disclosing for the first time in their lives. I get that. If I’m at a book signing and there is a line of 10 people, there will be one who wants to talk to me about their case. If it’s 300, there will be five people in line saying that they want to talk to me about their cases. For example, I just gave a speech with Cy Vance, the DA, and one woman told me about her case from 1973 that Martha [Bashford] and Melissa [Mourges] solved.

It’s all over the country, you know. There are people who have done what I’ve done, but there are places where there’s just never been that little ray of hope to take somebody forward and that’s what I love about Joyful Heart. That’s what I love about everybody’s spirit at Joyful Heart. That’s what I love about Mariska’s vision to put this together, because it’s exactly what my experience has been. But she’s got much wider reach and she’s given me that with her, and it’s lovely.

ST: How did you finally decide to put the pen to paper to write a book?

LF: I never figured I’d do it until after I hung up the prosecutorial shoes, but in the late eighties a publisher came to me and asked me to write the nonfiction book, Sexual Violence. I went to [Proescutor Bob] Morgenthau and I went to the City Ethics Board, and everybody said “fine, just don’t do it on city time.” So it took forever. I had a couple of big cases and didn’t get to do it. [Sexual Violence] was published in 1993.

Then I said to my husband, “you know I’ve always wanted to write crime fiction; that’s been the dream.” I went back to Morgenthau and asked him if I could. I think nobody took it seriously, no one thought that it would work.

I felt I had to write what I know, so I had the female protagonist in a non-traditional role with my composite detectives. I wish I’d known Chris Meloni, because he’d have had a starring role.  One of my best friends, Esther Newburg, a great literary agent at International Creative Management, told me to stop whining about wanting to write a book. She said I already had the hardest thing to get, which is an agent and in my case, a friend who would read my pages and tell me if I can do it. So I sat and down and just started to write.

I went off on this summer vacation of ’94 and Ester said, “don’t get carried away. Everybody thinks they can write a book.” So, you know, I played tennis, I swam, I antiqued, I did what I did. But I wrote about 65 pages of a book. I gave it to her at the end of the summer and she told me to keep going. At Christmas, I gave her the next–I think I had 90 pages. I didn’t think she could do anything with it until the end. Then she called me right after Christmas, she said, “where are you now?” I told her I was in a cab. She said, “no, but where’s the cab?” I look out the window–I just lectured at NYU Law School. I said, “well, it’s on 23^rd Street and Park Avenue.” She said, “I want you to remember where you are when I tell you that there are three publishing companies that are bidding on your first novel.”

That was FINAL JEOPARDY that came out in 1996. And now SILENT MERCY is the thirteenth book in this series. I pinch myself. It really is a dream come true. It’s thrilling.

Writing keeps me in the public service work, too. There’s not a week that goes by that I don’t call the “Ms” [Martha and Melissa] or people from my old office. I’m still a lawyer. I go to continuing legal education classes and learn about DNA and cutting-edge issues.

In the new book, why the women who are killed has to do with religious institutions. They’re all victimized for their beliefs. It’s sort of about the prejudice and bigotry against women in many organized religion settings. So I love to find some real issue and then weave a story out of it. HELL GATE, my last one [which came out in paperback on March 1], was based on political scandals. HELL GATE was all about that kind of scandals that you read about in the news. I drew it all from real cases.

So it’s my old interest, my respect for the law, my love of literature–crime novels, if you can call them that. It’s about putting them all together. It’s fun.

ST: What part comes first when you’re thinking about a new book, or is it different for every one?

LF: It’s usually established since they’re continuing characters, which is kind of like cheating. Because they’re friends now and I don’t have to create a whole new detective. So usually it’s a setting or a theme. Every story has a backdrop of a historical New York City section. I love to look at some setting where, from the surface it looks very elegant and familiar to all of us, but if you dig a little deeper there’s something treacherous underneath.

I also love cutting edge forensics. The third book was COLD HIT in 1999, which came from the first time I saw that expression in an FBI article in The New York Times. It’s dynamic because it’s always ongoing and there will always be some breaking technology, DNA will continue to be refined and used more broadly. My ears and eyes are open and I keep extensive clippings and files.

ST: Do often think to yourself that something you see or hear around you would make a good character or plot?

LF: Yes–even the snips of conversation you hear at the next table. You just find things in the most unexpected ways.

ST: So are there any other dreams that you have?

LF: My cameo in SVU never happened! When that dream is fulfilled, I’ll be okay.

ST: Well, thank you so much for taking the time, especially in the middle of all the preparation for this big tour.

LF: The book tour, yes. I love it because you know, the books are in the box. It’s been finished, it’s just a launch. It’s just fun to be with people who like to read and who like these stories.

You know for me it’s such a nice intersection because when I’m in the bookstores I’ve never done an event where somebody doesn’t raise their hand and mention Law & Order: SVU, even if they don’t know that I know Mariska, or don’t know about Joyful Heart. It’s always a nice way for me to feel connected to her and to the organization.

Linda Fairstein’s new novel, SILENT MERCY, is being released today, March 8th, by Dutton. In addition to being an author, advocate and former Chief Prosecutor of the New York County Special Victims Unit, Fairstein also serves as Vice Chair of the Joyful Heart Foundation’s Board of Directors.

They say to write about what you know and Linda Fairstein, the former New York County District Attorney Special Victims Unit Chief Prosecutor certainly knows the subjects that she fills her pages with. In this part of our interview, continued from our post on Friday, Fairstein talks to me about the evolution of the rape kit, what it was like to be prosecuting cases as the science around DNA was beginning to take hold and her thoughts on the backlog of untested rape kits.

Sarah Tofte: So, I know that rape kits were around slightly before DNA testing became available.

Linda Fairstein: Yes.

ST: Could you talk a little bit about this? One thing I find very interesting in general about the backlog, which I’ll get to, is the amount of care that has gone into evolving the rape kits so that they keep up with technology, what we’re learning from the criminal justice system and what we need from it. Sometimes there’s a bit of a disconnect between how much care has gone into creating a process of integrity and quality of evidence, efficiency in collection and compassion and care for the victim and what happens after–for it to just then sit in a storage facility after all this effort and energy went into it…

LF: Right.

ST: I’d love to hear a little bit about what rape kits looked like in the mid-to-late seventies when you were starting out, before there was DNA to be tested and a little bit about how rape kit evidence and the collection evolved. What did it look like to collect sexual assault evidence from a victim?

LF: I would say that the worst thing about scientific evidence when I started in the seventies was the terrible unevenness across the country with which victims were met in hospital emergency rooms until very recently. Of course some of that still persists.

So there was no such thing as a rape evidence collection kit. I believe the first one started in the early seventies and not as a result of the criminal justice system deciding to do it. The kits were called Vitullo kits. Louis Vitullo was, I believe, a sergeant in the Chicago Police Department. He despaired, as did many detectives–good ones from around the country–of the fact that if a victim was examined in an emergency room, there were no protocols for how to do it as there are now. There were no SAFEs [Sexual Assault Forensic Examiners] and SANEs [Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner; both these terms refer to the specially-trained personnel who attend to the unique medical needs and evidence collection of sexual assault victims]. You would get an ER doctor, some some who had never performed a GYN exam other than on a med school rotation. Whether or not anybody thought to collect evidence just depended on who was on call.

Sometimes there would be an examination and a scraping of the vaginal wall and slides prepared with semen on them for the purpose of blood group typing. The general procedure was that one of those slides would stay in a hospital laboratory and the other would ideally go with the police officer to a police laboratory. But there was no mechanism for getting them there. So Vitullo, to my understanding, went home and got his wife’s cardboard shoeboxes every time she went shoe shopping. He made a point to put the slides inside, tape it up for chain of custody, sign them, date them and get them back to the police lab. As I say, uneven all over the country.

So I remember in the early seventies, the first kits were introduced in New York hospitals. They were, you know, the size of the kit that you work with today–four or six inches by eight inches long, but very slim. We really all learned over time and they kept evolving, and somebody early on had the good idea to say we want an envelope for fingernail scrapings. What if she scratched him and there’s skin or something of evidentiary value under her nails? We wanted an envelope for pubic hair combings because there might be his body fluid in those. All without DNA plans. I mean, we would just think of anything. Soil, dirt, fiber, in a case that she had been abducted, the seat of a car or anything as you would in a homicide that might be of potential value.

The kits changed with time, which was a good thing as different things happen. For example, when we had the terrible AIDS epidemic of the 1980s in New York, we realized we needed vials to collect blood to do testing for HIV infection to do a baseline test, which the victim would follow up on later. When we began to see drug-facilitated date rapes–it had always happened with different drugs, alcohol and sleeping pills before the advent of designer drugs when it became much more frequent–there were instructions and vials added for how to test and screen for toxicology. Then, in the late eighties after the introduction of DNA, most people really began to understand that science could solve some of these cases. It could certainly connect to one individual out of billions on earth and could just as importantly exonerate somebody who might be wrongly identified. So again, as those kits morphed, changed, absorbed more information, the instructions for how to do an exam improved, changed. I mean, Joyful Heart has been enormously helpful in the last two years in getting these kits introduced in hospitals, first designed to be around New York State. Obviously that information, the training film that Mariska did–is used around the world.

My heart breaks for the victim who gets taken to a hospital in some place where there has been no attention to this issue. There are a lot of those places in the United States, sadly. Even all big cities do it unevenly. But there’s no excuse in 2011 for a hospital not to be able to get the evidence from a victim’s body, which is the crime scene–the only crime where the body really is the crime scene–and to get that to the police laboratory that’s going try and connect an offender to the case.

ST: So do you remember the first case that you solved with DNA?

LF: I do. It was a homicide and, despite a very lengthy hearing–almost three weeks–to explain the use of DNA and the science of how it connected the murder weapon to the victim and the offender, the judge ruled against us, said it was too experimental, not valid and reliable, that this stuff was never going to fly in legal terms. The jury never heard the evidence. That was 1988 when we were still able to use it as often as we could to exonerate people who were wrongfully convicted.

That case was one of many going on around the country where hearings had to be held about the validity of the scientific evidence. People were thoroughly mystified for the most part by the science of DNA and how it could possibly connect. In 1989, in a Bronx County case, the first DNA test that was admissible was admitted in a Bronx rape case. Then there was a case of homicide on Long Island. That began to blow things open for us in the best sense and we moved forward.

ST: In those years when you were starting to use DNA in more criminal cases, before New York discovered its backlog, what did that do? You talked a bit about how it took some weight off the victim in some cases for providing all of the evidence—why don’t you talk a little bit about how your cases started to change and how you were able to resolve your cases differently as you were starting to rely more on DNA?

LF: Again, for those fans of Mariska and crime novels, I’m smiling because it was so very different then. The results you could get in 24 hours now took six months in 1986 and the first few years afterwards. There was not a DNA lab then, there was a biology lab, but not a quick way to process DNA, except for Quantico at the FBI. So we would send a sample, potentially to Quantico, which was getting requests from all over the country. So they could only do a handful of them. To get a preliminary result took six months. So, you had to build your case without it. At the end of six months, in the rare number of cases, you might get the wrong guy,and you let him go. Or you’ve got the incredible phone call from a scientist telling you that everything your witness said can be confirmed with science: that there’s only one person out of four hundred million who could have this sequencing of DNA.

So we all had to learn the science–I mean how it was done was very important. The forensic biologists were amazing in the time they spent educating lawyers about it. For the first many years we all had to use private labs because there just weren’t city and state labs. So the expense then was enormous. My recollection is that in the eighties, if the FBI didn’t do your test, you were talking about at least $5,000 per sample. So if you had the victim and you had wanted to eliminate her boyfriend and you had maybe three suspects, you could be talking about $25,000 dollars. Then, there’s how, in the criminal justice system, you are making decisions about prioritization. This is an ugly thought, but it was all so gradual. I mean we were grateful for what we had in 1989, but by 1994 there finally was a databank. So things happened that you could never have predicted. I just didn’t have the vision to see how this was going to change the system but it has revolutionized it in absolutely every way.

ST: As a prosecutor, you may not have been the first responder, or the one to open up the rape kit, but you would be in communication with a lab and know what condition the rape kit was in. Could you tell the difference between someone who collected the rape kit from the victim who only had a general sense of medical care but didn’t understand evidence collection versus someone who was given at least rudimentary training on evidence collection? What would the difference in those two kits look like from an evidentiary point?

LF: Oh, that’s a great question. For example, I remember to this day a case where a victim was taken to Bellevue [Hospital] in the middle of the night and the person on call was a neurosurgeon. And he had never examined the vaginal wall, and there were nurses–not SAFEs–but nurses who had done this many times who tried to talk him through it. There is, as you know, an instruction sheet to the steps inside the kit. I mean, ideally a plumber could open that kit and do the steps. That particular doctor just wasn’t interested in doing it and just he did slides. He left all the ot her manila envelopes that might have had potential value. I remembered that kind of circumstances versus the times when I would go up to the lab and work with our friends, Dr. [Mecki] Prinz, bringing samples from the [New York Office of the Chief Medical Examiner] OCME now, and that magic of opening the kit so you could examine it with pretrial, and having them show me that everything had been done meticulously and every step had been followed.

At some point in the late eighties, maybe, we began to see forensic examiners, SAFEs and SANEs. SAFEs understood how important this issue was in giving care to a patient. The original response I used to get going to hospitals to train was, “we’re here to save lives. We’re here for the victim’s physical well-being. We’re not an evidence collection department.” And we’d say, “this is her well-being, this is the only shot at her well-being.” So detectives would sometimes fight with doctors to do those steps.

By the mid to late eighties it was getting better and everybody was introduced to DNA. You might say that some in pockets of places came to it much later than others, but people got it. Kits were revised, kits were expanded, manuals were created to help with training. I didn’t forgive incompetence in the early days, but I understood why people not trained couldn’t do it. I hated that they wouldn’t open the box and read the instructions and use all the envelopes.

Now, there’s just no excuse at all. I mean nobody in even those days, in the seventies and early eighties, had an hour of a course about the sexual assault victim in four years of medical school. By the late eighties, Columbia University of New York, Cornell University [Medical School]–right down the street from where we are today–would begin to include some of us as guest lecturers, just for an hour. Many obviously have gone beyond that now. And with ER medicine a specialty in most places, it’s very much a part of the ER training, because you see so much of it.

ST: So things are moving forward on the DNA front, but 1999—or maybe a bit earlier–you learned that there was a big backlog of untested rape kits in New York City. Can you talk a little bit about how you found out about it? I’m sure you already had intuition or thought or knew that not every kit was getting tested, and 1999 was still very different than 2011.

LF: Yes.

ST: I want to talk about that at some point too–the difference in New York having a backlog in 1999 versus LA having one in 2009. But, first, how did it come to your attention that you had a significant backlog that was as big as it was and what did you do about it?

LF: Okay, we knew from the time that the first small databanks went up in 1994. In 1996 that there was a way to have a computer attempt to compare untested evidence to known offenders, or other crime scenes. The problem was, like everything, a resource problem. The police department at that time in New York was acting with very little until databanks came along. They would only test kits when there was a defendant arrested and you had a suspect against whom to test “match” or “doesn’t match.” So we–my colleagues and I at the DA’s office–were all pretty much aware by the late ‘90s that kits were being collected every week and were kind of stacking up if there wasn’t a suspect. Citywide, it became a problem. The mayor’s problem. Rudy Giuliani’ criminal justice people realized it. I mean, everybody was on the same page at the same moment in New York, which doesn’t usually happen. Howard Safir was the Police Commissioner and there was a genuine care about this issue. The count became somewhere between 16,000 and 17,000 of these kits. And everybody was committed to taking them on, and taking them all on–not prioritizing stranger victims over acquaintance, recognizing that some acquaintance attackers also attacked strangers. I mean they may rape their wife, but they also may be going out on the street, foolish to think anything else of it.

So the decision was made–at great expense to the city–to round up these 16,000 plus kits, and outsource them because our lab couldn’t; no lab could do it. That it would take several years. Three labs were selected by their credentials and board certification. These kits over a period of four or five years were outsourced to the three labs to come back with hits.

ST: What did you learn? You know the big debate right now among those of us who are working to solve the rape kit backlog: the big debate is, do you test all kits, or you just test the stranger rape kits? What’s the value of testing non-stranger rape kits? One thing that I found so compelling when I talked to Martha and Melissa was the number of cases that end up being resolved or solved, that they weren’t expecting to resolve or solve, either at all or in the direction that they went. Would you talk a little bit about these hits that were coming back? What did you learn? Even as an expert in sexual violence and an expert in how perpetrators work, what did you learn about the nature of sexual violence, but also the value of testing as many kits as you can?

LF: Sure. Even though I left the DA’s office in 2002, I stay very closely connected with the DAs working with the kits, Martha Bashford and Melissa Mourges, who I think know more about this than any two lawyers on the planet. They began to call me as the hits came back, and you know, first of all it was just… there were a lot of surprises. There were cold hits, which continue to be made today in 2011, connecting cases to people only now being arrested somewhere else for a crime eligible to go in the computer. So that’s still thrilling. They recently solved the case of a 16-year-old girl whose attacker was only now arrested in Virginia for drugs. Imagine knocking on her door, calling her and saying, “I’m sure you still think about this every day of your life, and we’ve got him now,” which is one of the most thrilling parts to be able to give to another human being.

The concept that some people have that if you’re doing acquaintance rapes, you’re not going to learn anything about stranger rapes is just a fallacy. In acquaintance rape cases, not only is, “yes [there was] consent” often the defense, but sometimes the defense is, “I don’t know what she’s talking about, I didn’t have sex with her.” So just getting DNA in a case like that makes him a liar and resolves this.

New York had one exoneration that I know of. So, for example the LA County Sheriff’s Office decided not to test kits in cases in which there was, in some other way, a conviction. Well, Martha and Melissa set a man free who had been wrongly convicted. There was such a range of value to doing this that you couldn’t even go in and try and parse out from what you think is your experience and say “we’re just going to do it for these victims.” It’s just wrong.

ST: It seems like every week we hear about a new jurisdiction that has a backlog. As they are discovering their backlogs and trying to wrestle with is this worth the resources, what does the New York model show them? You know, for these jurisdictions that are trying to figure out right now, is it worth it for us to get rid of this backlog? What would you say to them based on your own experience?

LF: You know, I think of the examples in the NYPD and the LAPD–the idea of solving any number of cases is bringing justice to those victims who have been denied it all these years. It’s taking potentially a bad guy off the street. The chance to exonerate just one person is huge. It’s a lot of money and a lot of resources, but I just think it has to be done.

Linda Fairstein’s new novel, SILENT MERCY, is being released tomorrow, March 8th, by Dutton. Check back then for the third installment of our interview. In addition to being an author, advocate and former Chief Prosecutor of the New York County Special Victims Unit, Fairstein also serves as Vice Chair of the Joyful Heart Foundation’s Board of Directors.

I recently had a chance to sit down with bestselling crime novelist,

Sarah Tofte: Thank you for taking the time to talk today me today. First of all, I would love to learn why you became a prosecutor.

Linda Fairstein: It was a very different time, as many women know from their mothers, aunts and grandmothers. There were many professions that were closed to women in those days. I went to Vassar College and I was the last all-women’s class. I went there because it had a fabulous liberal arts education and the English Department was very strong. What I wanted to do all my young life was write–that was my ambition. My father, whom I adored, used to roll his eyes and say, “you know you have nothing to write about, you need a career.” I neared the end of college and realized I did need a job, if not a career, and my other interest was public service. I was very much a child of the John Kennedy era—“ask not what your country can for you…” and so many people, my 60s generation, were interested in public service. So I decided to apply to law school.

I went to the University of Virginia. 350 people in the starting class and I think there were eleven women. Early on my attention was captured by criminal law, criminal procedure–the very human elements. I knew the corporations weren’t for me. Trusts and estates weren’t for me. The idea of working in the courtroom and doing justice was what I wanted to do. The New York County—people call it Manhattan–but the New York County District Attorney’s Office was considered the premiere training ground for young lawyers at the time, and there were seven women out of 200 lawyers. There were very, very few women doing litigation of any kind in courtrooms and the District Attorney [DA] at the time, Frank Hogan, was an older gentleman who didn’t think it was appropriate for women to be trying felony cases in the courtroom.

I did not go, as many young lawyers do today, to work on special victims issues. There was not a special victims unit in any police or prosecutor’s office in America. Our laws were so archaic as they dealt with rape and sexual assault. One needed corroboration; one needed independent evidence in a case beyond the victim’s word before she could even get in the courtroom. So the year before I joined the office, there were more than 1,000 men arrested for rape in New York City in the five counties, and only 18 were convicted.

So I didn’t go there to do that work, I went to learn the skills of a trial lawyer. The doors were just beginning to open for women in the courtroom and Mr. Hogan died 18 months after I got there, when Bob Morgenthau became DA. It was the serendipity for me of the laws beginning to change. The corroboration requirement was eliminated by the State Legislature. So rape victims were beginning to come in and that office set up a special victims unit. Actually Los Angeles Police Department was the first PD to have a special victims unit in 1972–then called the Sex Crimes Unit–and New York followed almost immediately. So our office set up the first prosecutorial unit to correspond, recognizing that we really had to have very special efforts to get women into the system and to trust a criminal justice system that had never been welcoming before.

I think the special victims unit was set up with two lawyers in ’74 when I was still handling misdemeanor cases. When Mr. Morgenthau came in, he asked me to take over the unit, which was about 18 months old then. He felt it was important that there be a woman at the head of the unit to try and make it more victim-friendly. I was 29 years old and I don’t think that would be replicated in a big city prosecutor’s office today. I say it with a smile on my face, but he really thought that was important. He asked me to take it over and we both assumed that I would do it for maybe a year or two, or probably burn out, and want to move on to something else.

It’s the work that kept me there 26 more years. It was wonderfully challenging and rewarding every day because finally, people—women, children and occasionally male victims—who had been denied justice for so long were beginning to get it. Not by any means on wide, wide margins, though. The first fifteen years of my career, from 1972 to ’86, were before there was any forensic use of my three favorite letters of the alphabet, DNA. The merit of using DNA is so obvious from great television shows like [Law & Order:] SVU, movies and crime novels. But the fact is also that for many victims, DNA means not having to rely solely on their ability to identify somebody after the stress of what they’d experienced.

The first 15 years were fascinating. The laws were beginning to change, and we helped. We lobbied for the elimination of the rest of the corroboration requirements. We lobbied for passage of the rape shield law, which for the first time put in place protections to prevent victims’ entire sexual history from being opened at the trial. We tried to make the system respond to cases of domestic violence, which had always been considered a private act. I mean the crimes are on the books–they’re the same if you club somebody over the head who’s a stranger or your wife. But private matters, the defendant was usually let out of jail. People were told to go home, cool down, think about it with a level head. There was no recognition of the lethality, of the likelihood that this would escalate and to possibly be murder. So it was a very exciting time because it was an entirely new field. Not new crimes–they had been obviously happening for as long as people have been on earth–but finally new ways to deal with them. And that’s what kept me there.

In 1986, I was asked for the first time to consider using DNA in a case. I think I was one of the first handful of prosecutors asked to do that. It was not yet accepted as a valid technique in any court in America, but I learned the science. I studied with one of the great forensic biologists named Jack Ballantine, who’s a leader in his field in Florida now. That just opened an entirely new perspective. I mean I get chills just thinking about it now, what that ability gave us in terms of trying to fight this battle harder and being able to say to a survivor of a rape, “you know, it doesn’t matter that it was dark and your head was covered by a pillow. Science is going to tell us who did this.”

That became the next 15 years as we fought to get the courts to admit into evidence. 1989 was the first year in a case that DNA was admitted. We had used it before then to exonerate suspects, which we continue to do. The whole technique of DNA, of the science of it, the whole techniques used in the science continue to change, to improve. The work always, for me, had an enormously deep emotional content, and I liked that. I liked being able to give to victims and survivors the chance to get in the courtroom and have justice done. So that kept me there thirty years.

ST: So, a lot of things I’d love to follow up with. Let me think where I want to go first. I’ll start with some of the specifics. Talk a little bit about that era before DNA the criminal justice system really knew about it, much less really used it. Typically, what kind of evidence did you have to rely on if you were trying to make a case? What did you have when you didn’t have DNA? What kinds of barriers were there to making a good case when you only had a certain kind of evidence?

LF: As you know, Sarah, in the system then and now, there’s always sort of investigative distinction between stranger cases and acquaintance cases. Some acquaintances are dates, but some are teachers, doctors, lawyers, people… It just means that for law enforcement the issue is not knowing who the assailant is, it’s proving if there was consent or not. The stranger rape cases are the ones that have been most affected by DNA. So in the stranger cases, they were investigated like any other crime, and sometimes you were able to get DNA, like in cases that the defendant ejaculated. Then, all we had was blood group typing of the seminal fluid, and it was nowhere near the certainty if it was a common blood type. You might have been able to exclude somebody with this DNA, but it could never pinpoint someone with certainty–that happened if you got lucky.

Generally then, the cases really depended on the victim’s ability to describe and identify her attacker in a lineup, as in any other criminal case. If there were fingerprints, for example, in a burglary case in an indoor crime scene, like a victim’s apartment, you might be more likely to find fingerprints. You might find the window… there are certain surfaces—if you watch SVU, you know–that are conducive to leaving fingerprints. Sometimes if the defendant will go into the kitchen and pour himself a glass of water before he left, or take something from the refrigerator, and we’d get very lucky.

But outdoor crime scenes are where many rapes happen. Rooftops, parks, playgrounds…you’re not going to have the surfaces conducive to leaving fingerprints. So, the stranger rapes were worked like homicide investigations. Sometimes there was evidence, sometimes there wasn’t. Sometimes your victim had, sadly, a good long opportunity to see the assailant. Kept in her apartment, in the stairwell, lighted, and she had chances and because it is such an intimate crime, I try to turn that around and say this isn’t a mugging that took three minutes. This took twenty-seven minutes that she was with him. He was close to her and touching her. She can describe the skin texture, maybe tattoos on part of his body not visible. So we worked everything we could, but it made the victim very fallible in all this. If she made any “mistakes,” or if she was blindfolded, or turned around and didn’t have the opportunity… there was sadly a lot of self-blame by victims, victims who would wrongly think the pressure was on them to figure out who the assailant was. So they were very, very tough cases.

It was also in the seventies and early eighties when I started doing this, a point in time when our culture didn’t speak openly about these issues. I mean you would have known more if we’d have had a prime time television show doing what Mariska [Hargitay] did in the seventies. It was just a taboo topic. It was rare that the mainstream media wrote about sexual assault. People didn’t think it happened to our sisters, and daughters, and mothers. So a lot of what we were doing as rookie prosecutors was trying to educate the public to change attitudes and, at the same time, understand how vulnerable everybody was to the potential of this kind of victimization.

Linda Fairstein’s new novel, SILENT MERCY, is being released on March 8th by Dutton. Check back Monday for the second installment of our interview. In addition to being an author, advocate, and former Chief Prosecutor of the New York County Special Victims Unit, Fairstein also serves as Vice Chair of the Joyful Heart Foundation’s Board of Directors.

Kimberly Hurst, Executive Director of the Wayne County SAFE Program

Sarah Tofte: Thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. Would you talk about your current work and how you got here?

Kimberly Hurst: I am the Executive Director for the Wayne County Sexual Assault Forensic Examiner’s Program. I founded the program in 2006, and we are the only non-profit provider of sexual assault exams in Detroit. We are the largest SAFE program in the state and the busiest. We provide medical and forensic care, as well as community- based advocacy and crisis intervention services. We provide a comprehensive and compassionate continuum of care in order to improve the community’s response to sexual assault and set a higher a standard.

I am a licensed physician’s assistant and my training is in Emergency Medicine. I have been practicing for ten years. When I was in school, I had a strong interest in the forensics and the pathology. I had done a rotation doing autopsies and I was very intrigued by that side of medical care. I learned about the Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner training program, but since I am not a nurse, I didn’t think it would apply to me. When I realized that physician assistants could get trained to be a SAFE, I did it. Basically, the training gives medical personnel the knowledge base and skill set they need to effectively and expertly meet the medical-forensic needs of the sexual assault patient.

My first job out of school was working in Detroit in a busy Emergency Department. Here I saw a huge need for SAFEs. I realized how much sexual assault occurred in Detroit, and yet there was no SAFE program for victims to go to—they all were being treated in the hospital by whatever nurse or doctor was on duty or being referred to another county to receive these specialized services. It didn’t seem to make sense that there was no program in Detroit, given the great need for it. You could see how the exam would not get done correctly in the ER, that there was no specialized equipment, that the crisis support wasn’t there. There were just so many missed opportunities. I decided we needed to get these services in Detroit, and that is what inspired me to start the Wayne County SAFE Program.

ST: Was there anything during the course of your SAFE training that surprised you about the level of skill and care involved in the process?

KH: I was surprised at every point. The first exam I ever did on a rape survivor was as a student while doing a rotation in the emergency room, before I had any training. My attending physician handed me a rape kit, told me there was a patient in the exam room who needed a rape kit, and told me to go do one. I opened the rape kit and read the instructions, in front of her, and then did the examination. We never had one hour of training in PA school on how to do a rape kit, not one. There was nothing offered, so I was not prepared. When I looked into how I would go about getting training, and I went to the training, I was blown-away by what I did not know and about the amount of information I was not given during my medical training.

ST: Why do you think that medical schools don’t offer much in the way of training on rape kit collection?

KH: I think that some of it is that the primary focus for doctors when someone is coming into the emergency room is on the provision of medical treatment, and so evidence collection or the ‘rape kit’ is treated as an afterthought. I think that, traditionally, medical schools feel that a doctor is going to encounter a rape victim so infrequently that they don’t need to invest too much in training during medical school for it. We just have never really given sexual assault patients the time or consideration they deserve.

ST:  OK, so you decide to start this program. How did you go about making it happen?

KH: Well, I first needed to just figure out the basics of how to become an incorporated entity and how to become a non-profit. I went to see some leadership in one of our county’s health systems and they directed me towards Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, and they were generous enough to give us our start-up funding. I also made sure to talk to all the stakeholders in the community, especially in the medical and victim advocates’ communities, to get their sense of what they needed from a SAFE program.

We have four large health systems in our county. Our first year we worked with one of the four health systems, and had about 130 patients. The next two years, we were collaborating with two health systems and had about 205 and 240 patients, respectively. Then one of the largest and busiest health systems in the city offered to donate space, supplies and equipment to accommodate us and this allowed us to open a second clinic site within that hospital. The idea caught on with doctors, many were relieved at no longer having to do rape kits in the emergency department. People were seeing that we were doing good work, with good results. We saw the number of patients coming to see us more than double annually. We have now seen a total of over 2,000 patients, 697 patients alone last year. We have a staff of three full-time directors, one part-time director, two full-time social workers and a staff of about 20 contracted nurses. We are open 24/7, and provide care at three different clinic sites in the county being able to meet the victim at whichever clinic they want to go to.

It did take some convincing of some of the physicians to trust what we were doing, that we were taking care of the patient medically, providing STD and pregnancy prophylaxis if the patients wanted it. We worked a lot with law enforcement. The police were very happy to have people with special training collecting the evidence. They knew we would get them quality and comprehensive evidence, and make their jobs easier. In addition, we provide evidence collection of suspects as well.

ST: How are survivors directed to your services?

KH: 80% of the time, we are contacted by the ER after a patient presents at the hospital and either presents as being sexually assaulted, or the fact comes out during a medical exam. It is our policy to call back within ten minutes of the page.  We only see adolescents and adults, so no children under 12, unless they have already started their periods. If the assault occurred within 96 hours of the call, we will do an exam.

We have a very strong empowerment philosophy, so we never force the victim to have a kit done. We want it to be their choice and if they want to stop the kit collection at any point, we try to empower them to do that.  If at any time the patient decides they want to stop, that is their right to do so. We don’t require any involvement with law enforcement.  We will hold the evidence indefinitely until the patient decides whether they want to go forward with a police report or not.

When we get a call from the ER, we first need to figure out if they are medically stable to come to our clinic sites, or, if not, we dispatch a staff member to the ER. The staff will get to the patient within an hour. Usually the hospital can provide transportation but we make sure the patients have safe transportation home, and we make sure to pay for them to get safe passage to and from the hospital. We use a cab company with the option of female drivers. If the patient decides to report the rape, the police then pick up the kit from one of our clinics.

As for ongoing treatment, if there is a concern for injury that needs to be re-documented or re-evaluated, we will have them come back to see us. Otherwise, we refer them back to their primary care doctors or other community health clinics for follow up care. When it comes to the advocacy piece, we have advocates that follow them and provide emotional counseling and advocacy services.

ST: What difference has the program made for law enforcement and hospitals?

KH: The program has made a huge difference. It offloads our busy ER departments from the time they are tied up with sexual assault patients.  The ER staff are also aware that they have not necessarily been providing the best of their time and the best evidence collection. They are relieved that there is somebody like us here now to do that.  Law enforcement feels that they are getting better communication from us about what is being found during the  exam.  We are also seeing better prosecutions and increased rates of prosecution because we are documenting things better, we are more available to provide expert testimony and we have provided a much higher standard of care for survivors.  It is consistent, so every rape kit is being collected in the same way, with the same level of expertise.

ST:  What did you think when you first heard about the backlog of 10,000 or so untested rape kits in Detroit?

KH: My initial thought was that I was not surprised there were a lot of kits sitting around, but I was surprised about the actual number of kits in our backlog. Really, until I started reading around, I didn’t realize what a national problem this is. I am still awed by our numbers, and I am very interested in recommendations for improving our community’s response to rape victims and the processing of rape kits .

For our patients, we are dealing with a lot of questions—is this going to go anywhere? Is my kit even going to get processed? How do I know when it will get processed? All I can tell them is they are working hard to test all the kits, and sticking with it and finding out where their kit is in the whole scheme of things. It has an effect on patients wanting to come forward, and in a day and age when there are so many TV shows about the importance of DNA and how much it is used now patients think, this kit is it, and to think this kit is not going to be processed, or processed at all, is hard to digest. I try to educate patients on the realities of some of these things.

The best thing to come out of the backlog news is awareness among law enforcement and prosecutors and members of the public. I hope that, in turn, our community response to sexual violence will receive the time, money and focus the issue deserves and needs. It’s difficult to problem-solve when the city has as much crime as it does, and has the issues with funding that it does and when we are in a period where we are supposed to do more with less. But the community is taking ownership of our own problem, and figuring out together how to move forward.

ST:  Would you give me an example of how rape kit testing conducted at your center helped resolve a case that might otherwise have remained unresolved?

KH: We had a serial rapist here in Detroit a few summers ago. Our organization did several of the kits, and one was done by an area hospital. Currently, there are not enough envelopes and swabs in our kit to be able to handle every area you might wish to swab. At the hospital, they only swabbed the areas for which they had labeled envelopes for the area (for example, vaginal swab, pubic combing). But we are trained to think outside the box, so when we learned from the victims that the perpetrator had, for example, licked a breast, even though there was no envelope specifically for breast swabs, we collected a swab anyway. It turns out the only place where we got a DNA profile was from the breast swab. It hit the offender’s profile in the CODIS system, and prosecutors got the guy. Without the breast swab, they may not have. In this case, when you look to the DNA evidence we were able to get from our kits, and compared it to what was in the hospital’s kit that they collected, hands down ours was the more effective kit. Our staff was able to testify in the case, and I think it was our expertise in evidence collection that helped seal the case.

There have also been cases where we collect evidence, and no DNA is found that can be tested, however, the thoroughness of our documentation of additional injuries helps to make the case strong and we were called into collect suspect evidence, our expertise helped.

I do want to say, though, that there are no small cases for us. In every case, you never know what to expect, and every case is treated the same. We take them all seriously, and we collect evidence on every patient, and make all kinds of cases.

ST:  Your program is very successful, but what is on your wish list?

KH: Funding is always helpful. We always need additional funding for more equipment, more staff. Funding is always a struggle.

We also want to bring more program services to more people in our county.

ST:  How do you stay well in the work?

KH: For me personally, I have a great support system. I have a great family support system. I have great staff that I talk to on a daily basis, and involve in decision-making. I have some great advocacy and social work staff that are there to help, especially when you have a hard case and need to talk about the effect its having on you.

On a larger scale, I stand back and look at what we have accomplished and I can’t believe it. I look at the number of patients we have seen and when I go back through and look at our case logs and see their actual names, I remember that we were there for that one person in the aftermath of a terrible moment in their life. My hope and gut feeling is that we were there to help them start the healing process and, if nothing else, they encountered someone who was caring and compassionate no matter what the circumstances. We were there to provide the very best care we could for them. We are seeing more and more survivors at our clinics, not because there is more sexual assault, but because our services are being more recognized in the community. That is how I stay positive—I know we are making a difference.

Exam and evidence collection materials at a Wayne County SAFE clinic site

Armen Keteyian and Laura Strickler’s five month investigation into untested rape kits nationwide uncovering 20,000 untested rape kits in various cities won the 2010 Emmy for Outstanding Investigative Journalism, as well as the 2010 Gracie Award for Best Investigative Program.

Sarah Tofte: How did you get interested in journalism as a career?

Laura Strickler: In 2003, I was working on a masters in public administration, but I dropped out, and started doing a documentary film program and was completely taken with it. It was much more interesting than statistics.

Long story short, I started in public radio, and joined the CBS News investigative unit in 2006.

ST: How did you get interested in the story of the rape kit backlog?

LS: My colleague had just finished a brilliant story that looked at veteran suicides across the country, and it was a large data project that required my colleague to call every single state’s coroner’s office to figure out how many veterans’ deaths were classified as suicides.  It was a very significant story since it was at the beginning of the national discussion about what could be done to prevent military suicides.

So I was looking for some kind of data project, some story that I could tell, in part, by gathering new data and presenting it to the public. My favorite kinds of stories are where you examine data in a new way.

I had heard about the rape kit backlog in Los Angeles, and I thought, ‘Well, if it happened in LA, it might be happening in other cities.’ So I wanted to see what kind of data we could get from other cities, to take a look at the problem on a national scale. Of course, I thought the project would be quick, that it wouldn’t take that long…

ST:  So, where did you begin with your data collection?

LS: The first thing we wanted to find out was the last time there was a national data point for untested rape kits. We realized the last comprehensive study was done ten years ago, and no one had really looked at the problem nationally since then. So, we started calling dozens of experts on sexual violence and rape kits across the country to get their input on what kind of data would be useful to chart the problem, and the best way to get that data. Then we started calling cities to see if we could get information on their rape kit backlog.

What I did not know starting out, until later, is that there are two kinds of untested kits—there are the kits sitting in the police departments and never sent to the crime lab, and there are the kits that made it to the crime lab but have not been tested. I didn’t realize that when we focused on the cities that it meant obtaining two data points per city.

ST: How did the process go of collecting rape kit data? Did anything about the process surprise you?

LS: We had to be much more aggressive than we originally anticipated with some agencies in order to get the data, and there were plenty of jurisdictions that didn’t want to tell us anything. What we found is that often the reason why many police departments were not telling us anything is because they just didn’t know. They had no idea how many kits they had tested or never tested.

Once we figured out what kind of data we wanted to collect, and from which agencies, it was a process of calling and hoping you get to talk with that right person in the department who has the knowledge and information you need.

ST: Were you surprised to find that there were thousands of untested rape kits in police storage facilities?

LS: Well, I think that in this case, like what happens with many stories, is that you get a tip or a lead about a problem, and you start going down the road investigating, and you discover so much more than you had ever imagined.

Whenever we would hear back from a city that they had thousands of untested kits in their facilities, it was shocking. City officials had different reactions to their rape kit backlog. Some would downplay the significance of the untested kits. In one city, they told us that many of their untested kits would not yield results anyway, which is why they were not sent to a crime lab.

Some agencies were very forthcoming with their problems.

For example, the state crime lab in Louisiana was very transparent and they shared with us how long the kits on active cases had been waiting to be tested, including some that had been waiting for eight years to be tested. Even in cities that have big problems, it was commendable that they were open with us about the nature and extent of their problem, and their need for help.

One of the things I found most surprising is that there was no uniformity between jurisdictions with how rape kits are handled and that every jurisdiction had a different way of recording their rape kit data, or simply had no system at all for how to keep track of these things.

ST: Was there an interaction with a city the outcome of which surprised you the most?

LS: Cleveland. When we first called Cleveland to see if they had any untested kits, they were not open to giving us information. Months later, we did a story about a serial killer who allegedly killed 11 women and sexually assaulted numerous others in the Cleveland area. One reason he was able to get away with his crimes is that the rape complaints against him were not followed up on by the police. Cleveland has the highest rate of rape in the country. Now Cleveland just announced that they are going to count their rape kits and test all rape kits going forward. Based on my first interactions with them, it never occurred to me things would change so much.

I do want to add that in the process of this investigation, we spoke to so many prosecutors and police detectives who are very, very dedicated to helping rape victims find justice and some resolution. What I saw, though, was very real differences in how different law enforcement departments handle rape cases.

ST: A great strength of your reporting was the data you collected. Another strong element was the human element of the work, the interviews with survivors of sexual assault whose rape kits were or are in backlogs. How did you find the survivors you spoke with in the piece?

LS: We did a lot of outreach to victims’ groups across the country, and they put us in touch with Valerie Neumann, the first person we profiled in the story, a woman whose rape kit was never fully tested before her case was closed. The first time she called me, she just had a way of…she had a very strong and powerful story, she was so organized she had every single police record and email communication that happened between her and the police department. And it was vey easy to tell her story, because she had all the evidence with her about what had happened to her rape kit.

The second victim that we profiled was a long, long, process to get the interview, involving multiple trips to Oklahoma, and multiple phone conversations, and many arranged meetings that would fall through at the last minute. She was afraid to talk which I can understand. Finally, on one of my last days in Oklahoma, I was about to give up, when she called and agreed to meet me, and she decided she wanted to share her story.

We spoke with a lot of victims as part of our research for the story, and the most common refrain I heard was that, for so many of them, rape kit testing was a way to get closure, or at least a way to know that someone was listening to them, and that their case mattered to the police.

ST: What allowed you to dedicate so much of your time and energy to this story?

LS: I think it was when my boss here at CBS, said to me about two months into my investigation of the story, ‘I think you should just devote all your time to this story,’ and I just felt incredibly, incredibly lucky that I work at a place like CBS where they would be able to see that was necessary. From then on, it was much easier to make progress, because once I was no longer distracted by other stories, I could really dig in.

Any of these stories that can get at some kind of final, definitive justice, are incredibly compelling, human stories. It’s a tool that can provide peace of mind, and I think it’s certainly worthy of coverage and a lot of follow-up. At CBS, I got a lot of support on this story, and the way this business works, you could never, ever do this kind of thing without this kind of support.

ST: Describe the moment you heard your name called out as the winner of an Emmy for the report.

LS: It was incredibly rewarding. This story was a team effort with my correspondent Armen Keteyian and my senior producer Keith Summa and our team of interns. Almost immediately I thought about how grateful I was that the rape victims told their stories to us, and how grateful we are to them that they were willing to tell their stories. It takes so much guts and I am so humbled by their courage.

To learn more about Laura and her reporting on the rape kit backlog, be sure to visit the CBS News website.

Sarah Tofte: How did you decide to become a police officer?

Sgt. Liz Donegan of the Austin Police Department.

Sgt. Liz Donegan: I have always wanted to be a police officer, every since I was a little girl. I have four sisters and all of them will tell you that’s all I ever talked about when I was younger. It sounds cliche, but I really wanted to help people and I thought being a cop was an exciting way to do that. It took me a while to get around to becoming a police officer. I had served in the Army after leaving college. When my tour was up, I moved to Texas and began working at the Sheriff’s Department. I worked as a corrections officer and then was hired on with the Austin Police Department. I did not have any reservations about working within policing, as I had worked in many male dominated fields previously. I believed if I worked hard and it showed in my work then I would earn the respect of the other officers.

ST: Would you briefly describe the history of the Austin Sex Crimes Unit?

LD: The Austin Police Department has had a sex crimes unit since 1978. Previously, the Homicide unit was responsible for investigating sexual assaults. Actually, my administrative assistant, a retired APD officer was the investigator, the sole investigator assigned to the unit. We now have eleven detectives. I became the Sergeant of the unit in 2002.

ST: Starting in 2004, the Austin Police Department’s Sex Crimes Unit decided to overhaul the way it handled its cases. Would you talk about how those reforms originated?

LD: The training that I received when going through our police academy was geared solely toward stranger sexual assault. We were not trained in dealing with non-stranger sexual assault at all. In most departments across the country that is typical even today. To a certain extent, I have been trying to undo the training that I (and other officers) received. The training was helpful to a point, but it did not address the majority of sexual assaults we respond to. It also reinforced the myths about sexual assaults and who commit them – (strangers). When officers respond to and investigate these cases, they typically have little to draw on from their training.

As a society, we have been conditioned to the common misperception that sexual assault is typically perpetrated by strangers. We have bought into what we are being fed by the media and, to a lesser degree, what is being reported within law enforcement as “real” sexual assault. Then we wonder why officers sometimes don’t respond appropriately. I absolutely believe that as officers are educated about sexual assault, that they will do the right thing.

Why and how we changed the way we respond to and investigate sexual assault is directly tied back to training. I had attended a training about a year after having taken over the unit. I met Joanne Archambault, who is the Director of End Violence Against Women International (EVAW) and trains on non-stranger sexual assault. I realized at the training just how much my own bias and prejudice about sexual assault victims played into my investigative and supervisory decisions in cases. When I spoke with her about how we investigate cases, she told me honestly: You are not doing what you need to be doing for victims. That really took me aback – here I was the supervisor of the unit, and told that I was not doing the right thing for victims of sexual assault. I began to understand the ways in which my treatment of victims could re-victimize them.

So, when I returned we began a total overhaul within the department and the unit – a complete paradigm shift, from an emphasis on stranger sexual assault to an emphasis on non-stranger sexual assault. We had to learn to look beyond the initial, reflex judgment we had typically been making on a case. I learned that non-stranger sexual assault cases were extremely complicated, and not as simple as the stranger cases. And that non-stranger sexual assault cases can be difficult to prove. However, with a good detective, a smart detective who understands the psychology of sexual assault victimization, you can move forward with prosecution and hold perpetrators accountable for their crimes. 89% of cases that come to us are non-stranger sexual assault cases. They deserve and receive our full attention.

ST: So, it sounds like you had to overhaul the entire unit. What were some of the early challenges?

LD: It was a slow process initially. I had to deal quite a bit with detectives’ frustrations with how many “gray” areas there are in (non-stranger) sex crimes cases. The non-stranger sexual assault cases are incredibly difficult to investigate, because you have to get beyond the consent issue and figure out how to make your case by following the evidence and by thinking outside traditional policing. After having been educated myself, I realized that for these cases to be investigated appropriately, given how complicated they are, we needed the best detectives to work these cases. And so I slowly weeded out those detectives who didn’t get it or wouldn’t get it. I actively recruited those whom I thought were some of the hardest working, smartest, most committed detectives I could get my hands on.

I also had to work hard to impress upon my detectives that they play an integral role in victim’s healing. The way they handle the investigation and interact with the victim can positively – or negatively – impact a victim’s life. Our society says that, after murder, rape is the most important crime. But within many police departments that is not always the case. In the “old days”, sex crimes was not necessarily considered a good assignment. So, to effect change and the way the unit was viewed, how the detectives viewed themselves, I recruited detectives who were open to changing the way we investigate sexual assault cases. They had to be taught that they were important, that the work was important. They needed to feel valued in every way.

The really big push to effect change within Austin happened in 2004, when our SARRT (Sexual Assault Response and Resource Team) applied for a scholarship to improve our response, investigation and prosecution of non-stranger sexual assault. It was called the “Making A Difference” project. EVAW International and the Donner Foundation established this national project in which SARRT’s from across the country would apply for this three day intensive training. Eighty-eight teams applied; only eight were chosen, including us. We came together in San Diego and discussed the issues we were seeing nationally. We came up with ideas, then went back to our communities and implemented them.

We continue to make enhancements to our approach to sexual assault that are driven from this early “Making a Difference” project — which is great! We are fortunate because most of our key players (in the SARRT) are still actively involved. These reform efforts addressed changes within the disciplines. It wasn’t just the police department that was making changes — the advocates, the SANE’s, the district attorney’s office also made changes. We all came together to improve the service we provide to victims. Working collaboratively is the only way to go in my opinion. You have to have open dialogue with the other team members on your SARRT. We all want to hold perpetrators accountable for their crimes, but at times we get caught up in just doing our thing instead of remembering we can only be successful if we work as a team. Getting the right people on your SARRT, people open to change, is critical if you are really committed to making a difference.

Sgt. Donegan surrounded by the members of the Austin Police Department's Sex Crimes Unit.

ST: Part of the overhaul involved creating a public messaging campaign and slogan for the department: “We Believe.” Would you talk a bit about why you chose that phrase to represent your department?

LD: We chose this phrase because believability is the number one reason victims don’t come forward. Victims don’t report to police because they think we will not believe them, or we will blame them. If we can send the message to the community that, if you are sexually assaulted, and you come to us, we will believe you, then I think we can encourage more victims to come forward. All too often victims’ fears are well founded. We want to change that here in Austin.

Part of the “Making A Difference” project involved the gathering of data. We were very interested in why so many victims do not stay within the judicial system after having made an initial police report. A significant percentage – 40% – of non-stranger sexual assault victims were leaving the system, which was disturbing to me because we think – or I thought – we are doing a pretty good job here in Austin. We realize we have to work even harder at making victims feel safe and valued while working through a judicial system that is not victim friendly. The “We Believe” campaign and message was something we wanted to get across to the community, and also to the officers responding to these calls. At the police academy, our cadets are now taught in the academy the incredible influence they have when they first interact with a victim. That interaction will often influence significantly if a victim stays or leaves the process.

We have made the commitment to do everything possible to make a victim feel like she or he has made the right choice in coming forward to report the crime. We are currently looking at ways to keep the victims within the system, and what can we change within our department to get victims to stay.

To get back to why we chose “We Believe” as our theme, it’s for the victims. We know sexual assaults are happening out there and that most go unreported. Why? Because of that fear. The words “We Believe” just resonate so deeply to that point. It’s simple—we believe you, and you are safe with us.

ST: What change have you noticed in your officers since you began your program?

LD: I think the best way to highlight the change is to give you an example. We recently had a case in which the victim said a stranger had raped her. When we looked at the crime scene, her description of the assault just didn’t make sense. The detectives brought her in and interviewed her, but it just wasn’t adding up. I think in the old days, without our training, we might have dismissed the case then and there, thinking it didn’t happen. My detective continued investigating the case, because he believed she had been raped, and had a theory as to who committed the rape. Finally, I think she felt safe or comfortable enough to tell him exactly what happened. It was a complicated case, involving lots of self blame, etc…and I think to a certain extent this victim wanted to be a “better victim” for us. Victims often buy into the same myths that the larger society does. In this case, our detective’s training and understanding of the complexity of these cases put a rapist in jail. I was really proud of him, of his work and ultimately, of the service he provided to the victim.

And this is the point I make to my team over and over again: Whenever there is a question of the validity of the case, of what actually happened, and we think we should unfound a case, we better be sure we have the facts to support doing this. Just like we have to have the facts to support a founded case. We know that false reports happen in sexual assault. They happen in all crimes. The myth is that a significant number of sexual assaults are false reports and that is simply not true.

ST: What is the most difficult thing about investigating sexual assault cases?

LD: I think one of the most difficult things is the frustration detectives experience with the overwhelming complexity of the cases and the system itself. The cases that involve the defense consent – which are the majority – are incredibly difficult to investigate. I think it would be easy to throw your hands up and say the case is unsolvable. You have the victim saying one thing, the suspect another – you have no idea how to get to the bottom of this. Very very difficult cases that take an extraordinary amount of time to investigate and extraordinary investigators to solve them.

I had to re-train myself and my staff to focus on the perpetrator’s behavior and credibility, rather than focus so much investigative energy on the victim’s behavior and credibility. I think sexual assault is one of the few crimes where we put so much scrutiny on the victim first, and then, only if she has passed our own internal bias test do we proceed to investigate the case. Why are we not focusing more on the perpetrator? What about their actions and their behavior? We all too often make the victim feel like she is culpable, responsible for her sexual assault. And she is not. The perpetrator is wholly responsible for rape. Wholly responsible.

ST: What role does rape kit testing play in your investigations?

LD: In 2004, we discovered that we had a rape kit backlog of hundreds of untested kits. We hired two retired detectives to go through the reports to determine if the kits needed to be tested. As a result, we made some cold cases. As part of our Making A Difference reform efforts, we implemented a policy that every kit collected from a victim, when the victim has agreed to move forward, and when we can get a consensual partner elimination sample, will be sent to the lab for testing. We are very fortunate to have our own lab. Before, we used to send our kits to the state crime lab, and we would have to wait for months and sometimes years to get a result back. It was frustrating to say the least. So, when we got our own lab, we knew we would have the capacity to test as many kits as we could, and that is what we do. We test all of the founded cases (kits) because you never know what you will find, even if the case cannot go forward with prosecution. Most rapists are serial, so this is extremely important for being able to solve future crimes. It’s one more step in the process of showing victims that we are doing all we can to solve their case.

ST: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

LD: I just want to say that investigating sexual assault cases is a continuing process. It is still a process for me. I am still learning. I remind myself every day that I have to take each case at face value, and allow the evidence to lead me wherever it is going to take me. If you adhere to that philosophy, you will figure out what occurred. You will do your best by the victim who comes to you in trust and hope. Ultimately you will hold perpetrators accountable for their crimes and victims will be heard.

To learn more about the Austin Sex Crimes Unit, visit the We Believe website.

Sarah Tofte: Tell me a bit about your background and how you got interested in issues around rape kit reform.

Kristina Rose: I have been working for about 25 years on crime and criminal justice issues. In the 1980’s, I was lucky enough to serve on a county crime victim board that addressed crime victims’ concerns, and that is where I got my first introduction to violence against women issues. Hearing crime victims tell their stories, especially around domestic violence and sexual assault, really moved me.

When I worked at the Office on Violence Against Women I had a great boss who supported the projects I felt most strongly about, which included sexual violence issues. I became very interested in best practices for treating victims of sexual assault, especially involving the forensic examination. We developed a virtual training DVD with Dartmouth Medical School and as part of that project, I produced a segment involving interviews with victims about the experience of their sexual assault kit exam. The interviews really opened my eyes to what it means for a victim to go through an exam. I would spend two to three hours with each victim, going through every detail they wanted to share with me about the assault and the forensic examination. What I came away with was the knowledge that the way in which a forensic exam is conducted—how good the medical personnel are at working with victims—greatly influences the victim’s healing process and the success of the criminal investigation.

ST: What impact does the rape kit examination have on a survivor?

KR: Every survivor I interviewed had a different experience. When the experience was positive—when the victim came in contact with a forensic examiner who was well-trained and understood how to conduct a forensic examination, treated the victim with respect, communicated to the victim what the exam entailed, told the victim the assault was not her fault—the healing process started in a very positive way.

When the exam was bad, it had such a detrimental impact on the victim. For example, if the examiner was insensitive or judgmental. It eroded their self-esteem, it eroded their confidence in the system and it affected their ability to heal fully. I learned quite a bit from their experiences, what was good, what was bad and why it is so important for the examination to be done carefully, respectfully and competently. Hearing the stories of these women was life-altering for me. It affects me to this day. I still think of them. I thought of them while we were planning this sexual assault kit evidence research project.

3. How did you learn about the backlog?

KR: I’m glad you asked the question in that way, Sarah, because it offers me a great opportunity to clarify something that we at NIJ are hoping to educate the public about: evidence that has not yet been sent to a crime lab is not truly a part of what most people consider to be “the backlog.” There is a backlog of evidence in crime labs, of course, and I have been aware of this since I was at the Office on Violence Against Women. But I didn’t truly understand the distinction between that “backlog” and untested sexual assault evidence kits that are still in police custody and have not actually been sent to a crime lab until I joined the National Institute of Justice.

When the discovery of thousands of untested kits in Los Angeles was revealed, my colleagues and I sat back and said, “Is there something we can do to help?”

We reached out directly to the crime lab directors at the Los Angeles Police and Sheriff’s Departments—Greg Matheson at the LAPD and Barry Fischer at the LASD. We told them NIJ had some additional resources and they were so open to accepting assistance. As a research organization, we considered how we could study the situation in L.A. and possibly identify some promising practices that could be adapted by other jurisdictions facing similar situations.

As soon as the discovery of these kits in Los Angeles became public, other jurisdictions began to come forward about their untested sexual assault kits and it became clear the problem was not just in Los Angeles, but that the problem was deeper and wider than anybody knew or expected.

ST: How did the NIJ sexual assault kit evidence action research project come into being?

KR: After helping out in Los Angeles, we decided to take a more national approach. We knew we would be able to identify some promising practices out of the L.A. project, but what works for L.A. might not work in other jurisdictions across the country. If we only look at L.A., it will not give us a full picture of all the promising practices that may be out there.

Our first thought was to select several jurisdictions and offer them technical assistance to deal with their untested kits.  But if we just focused on technical assistance, we won’t really understand why and how the issue of kits not sent for analysis came to be. When the money runs out, the problem may just build back up again and we may not have addressed the underlying issues.

We thought about how we could employ a research approach to get at those underlying issues. We decided to fund action-research projects in three-to-five jurisdictions around the country—asking practitioners and researchers to work together to identify the problem, identify strategies to address the problem, put those strategies in place, and measure the impact they are having.

Using the action research model, the researchers come in at the beginning and analyze the data and pinpoint where they see the problem. Once the problem has been identified, it is up to the practitioners to identify the strategies they want to use to move forward. The researchers are constantly measuring and monitoring the implementation of the strategy, and if a strategy doesn’t appear to be working, they can make mid-course corrections.  They can keep doing that until they find something that is making a difference. And I think that through this approach, we can get at some issues that we may never have known that are serving as causes of and barriers to solving the issue of kits not being sent to a lab for analysis.

ST: Why should a jurisdiction apply for this project?

KR: If a jurisdiction participates in this project: 1) there is a very good chance they will be able to test formerly unanalyzed kits; and 2) they will learn about and be able to put in place sustainable solutions. We want to help jurisdictions move from having unmanageable and overwhelming backlogs of evidence that is sent to a crime lab, those where you lose control of the process, to having a system that feels manageable for them.

We would like, ultimately, to produce protocols and practices to share with jurisdictions around the country that may also be experiencing large volumes of untested kits.  Practices that are based on evidence from research and data, and can help jurisdictions get a handle on the problem, so they are not overwhelmed by it, and can put systems in place to help them move forward.

ST: Five years from now, what do you hope this pilot project will have accomplished?

KR: The ultimate goal would be to reform our criminal justice system so that all sexual assault victims feel comfortable reporting their sexual assault because they know the system is going to work for them. They would know that if they went through an exam, the evidence would be tested in a timely manner and may yield results that would help bring an offender to justice. I would hope that no sexual assault victim would have to wait years for a kit to be tested and uploaded to CODIS. Through CODIS, we can match crime scenes to offenders, and match crime scenes to crime scenes and stop serial rapists from committing these crimes. I know that testing the kit is not going to be the answer to solving every case, but we can do more to solve sexual assault cases. Getting those kits tested in a timely way is one of those steps.

One question we hope to answer through this research project is whether it’s effective to test every kit. I know some jurisdictions are doing it, and right now we don’t have the evidence to show that this is the best practice.

Education and public awareness about sexual assault are essential to helping people understand this crime and why it’s so important to report it. Raising awareness, whether it’s through a foundation like Joyful Heart, whether it’s through the White House, whether it’s through federal grants, is vital.

It’s difficult for victims to come forward and report their sexual assault. It’s important that if we are going to encourage victims to come forward and have a forensic exam, we must have the processes in place to test those kits. From my experience interviewing survivors of sexual assault, I realized the impact of good care—medical and forensic—can have on the victim’s healing process and sense of justice.  Hopefully, the results of this research project will add to our knowledge of why sexual assault kit backlogs exist and help us figure out the best ways to address the problem.

To learn more about the NIJ research initiative, visit the project’s landing page here: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/topics/forensics/sexual-assault-kits.htm

One of our hopes for endthebacklog.org and the Backlog Blog is to share stories of how individuals and organizations are working to eliminate backlogs once they’ve been uncovered. The hope is that other jurisdictions can learn from their successes and challenges, and that together we can develop strategies to ensure justice and healing for survivors of sexual violence. Earlier this week, I chatted with LA Police Chief Charlie Beck about his department’s efforts to resolve their backlog of untested rape kits.

Sarah Tofte: How did you discover that Los Angeles had a backlog of untested rape kits?

Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck: We always knew that we had a backlog of untested rape kits—I mean, we knew that when we collected kits from victims, that some of them were sent to the crime lab and some were not. Around three years ago, we decided to consider any kit collected from a victim and not tested as a kit that was part of the backlog. So, under the direction of then-Chief Bratton, we went into our evidence storage facilities to count the kits. We knew how many kits were waiting for testing at our crime labs, but we had no idea how many untested kits were in our storage facilities. Honestly, we didn’t make a whole lot of progress at first in figuring out how big the backlog was. So I got 100 or so of our cops to go in and spend weekends counting the kits. It took a few weeks, and we came out learning we had thousands of untested kits in our facilities.

That is when the impact of the backlog hit me, because now it was my problem. Now it became my backlog and my responsibility, and I came to the conclusion that we had a problem that needed to be addressed and that we needed to redefine our priorities and also redefine the way we thoughts about rape kit testing. We had to test every one of these kits, and eliminate the problem for good.

At first we didn’t know if we should test kits in all cases. The victim’s advocacy groups helped us come to realize that there are significant advantages to testing a kit other than just identifying an unknown suspect, and we realized we could connect crime scene evidence together and things like that. We also knew that testing every rape kit would build confidence in the criminal justice process for victims, by building their confidence—that is a huge piece. As the DNA database has become more robust, it’s just the right thing to do. Testing the rape kit is keeping the promise that the police make to a victim when we collect the kit from them—they go through a rape kit exam so that we will test it. You want the public to trust that we, as police, are here to solve crimes.

ST: What were some of the biggest challenges in clearing your backlog?

CB: There were lots of challenges. One is that you have to get everyone working with the same definition of what a backlog is and making sure we are all on the same page with our definitions. I found that what our crime lab considered a backlog was different from what detectives considered a backlog was different from what the City Council thought it was and from what advocates thought it was. Everybody actually wanted the same thing, the same outcome, but you have to get everyone on the same page.

The other huge problem was figuring out what kinds of cases were in our backlog. We had no idea how many kits were connected to stranger rape or non-stranger rape cases. We didn’t know how old the cases were. We didn’t know if some of the cases had already been solved by other means. It took us a long time to figure out exactly what kinds of cases we had in our backlog.

Securing funding was very difficult, as was coming up with a long-range plan that doesn’t just depend on the one-time heroic solutions. We needed a long-term plan for funding and making sure the backlog never comes back. A big part of getting funding for a long-term plan is making sure you have political buy-in from the city. We got that, in part, because of the incredible public attention being paid to this issue. People think we wouldn’t like that kind of scrutiny, but it actually helped us to motivate our officials to support us financially in what we needed to do.

ST: What advice would you give to police departments who don’t have the funding to end their backlog?

CB: First, you have to make rape kit testing a priority. The elimination of our backlog, when it is finally accomplished, will happen because of public, private, and federal funding. You have to see if you can leverage private money and see if you can get federal dollars. This is where it helped us to have all the public advocacy and pressure. That advocacy helped us to get funding. It helped us advance our goals of eliminating the backlog. All that enthusiasm and emotion and pressure applied to police departments to solve this problem can be a catalyst for us to gain support to end this problem. You can see the public attention as a problem or a solution, and we decided to make it part of our solution. We could use that attention to hold our elected officials accountable for giving us the funding we needed for our cause.

ST: What is your backlog like today?

CB: Every rape kit will have been tested by October of this year (2010). We will have all of those test results put into our DNA database by March of 2011. By early next year, we will have all the crime lab personnel hires we need to test every future booked rape kit in a timely manner, so that we don’t grow another backlog.

ST: What kind of additional government support would help you continue to make progress?

CB: My number one wish is for more research into how to make DNA testing more efficient, and how to put in better data tracking systems in our facilities. I would love to see the cost of a rape kit test go down from $1,000 or so to much less because of the invention of more efficient and effective technology. I would like to see a national discussion about what a rape kit backlog is, how to define it, and the best practices for how to deal with it. And, of course, we could always use more federal funding.

ST: What kinds of investigative leads have come out of testing the backlog in Los Angeles?

CB: We got dozens of stories where people have been identified and crimes have been solved, these last two years. The success on the DNA front has led to the capture of two of the most prolific serial rapists in Los Angeles. Some of the cases were very, very old. I have no doubt that we will solve hundreds of crimes once this backlog is eliminated.

ST: What motivated you to end the rape kit backlog?

CB: I have daughters. And I’ve obviously worked with hundreds of rape victims during my career and all those things weigh into it. The reason I became a police officer is to protect those who are less able to protect themselves. Victims where crimes go uninvestigated and go unsolved, they have no voice in the system. And that is what we are here for, to give them a voice.

ST: What would you tell a fellow police chief in another city who has just discovered they have a rape kit backlog?

CB: Don’t panic, recognize and try to deal with the reality, try not to get involved in organizational protective rhetoric, try to determine what the reality of your problem is, and face it head on. Then use everything that’s in your jurisdiction or authority to bring about the solution. There are a million ways to solve the backlog. You have to use all your resources. Don’t give up. Work at it everyday, but you need a long term and short-term plan. Detective work is about persistence and you have to apply that persistence to this problem. And, if they get stuck, they can call me.

ST: What does it mean to you that the rape kit backlog is close to being eliminated in Los Angeles?

CB: I would like to see the crime of sexual assault, become the crime that is most likely, of any crime, to result in arrest and prosecution. Victims should be unafraid to report it. And perpetrators should be extremely afraid to commit it. I want there to be a sense among would-be-rapists of a certainty of capture. All that comes from good police work and good science. There is no reason that people who commit these crimes should go unidentified. Proper investigation and good science could make the crime of rape a thing of the past. This is a national disgrace, and people have to recognize that we have to just dig in our heels, and get to work to end the rape kit backlog. It’s really that simple.