SACRAMENTO — The Los Angeles Police Department has a logjam of more than 5,000 rape kits that have not undergone forensic analysis because of a lack of DNA-testing resources, a leading advocate for rape victims told a state commission Wednesday.
"Every day, there are citizens in our state ... who are being sexually assaulted and otherwise victimized when they don't have to be. This is happening because our state and local laboratories lack the resources they need to utilize the forensic science of DNA effectively," said Gale Abarbanel, director of the Santa Monica-UCLA Rape Treatment Center.
Yvette Sanchez-Owens, the commander of the Los Angeles Police Department's crime lab, acknowledged that analysis has started on only 3,500 of the 9,000 kits logged by the LAPD.
Although some kits do not require immediate analysis, many more go untouched because of resource shortfalls, she said.
"There are times where they know the suspect already has confessed, so there is no need to process the kit," Sanchez-Owens said. "In a perfect world, we would like to test every sample. But our reality is we don't have the resources to get there."
L.A. City Councilman Jack Weiss, a former prosecutor who heads the council's Public Safety Committee, said he agreed that the department's DNA testing capacity had to be expanded.
Sanchez-Owens said the department has sent a budget to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa that would more than double the size of the LAPD's DNA staff from 29 to 71 over a two-year period.
"I've been pushing on both fronts," Weiss said. "The LAPD needs to expand its DNA testing capabilities, and the state needs to accelerate [its] testing."
Last September, The Times reported that two years after California set out to create a DNA database to help unravel thousands of unsolved crimes, the program had a backlog of 300,000 unprocessed DNA samples, attributable in large measure to a lack of staff.
Lance Gima, chief of the Bureau of Forensic Services at the California Department of Justice, said Wednesday that the backlog has been reduced to 175,000 because his staff has been putting in a tremendous amount of overtime. Gima said he has hired 20 new staffers but that it takes many months to train them and that he still has 14 vacancies.
He said it's difficult to hire and retain employees, in large part because state salaries are much lower than those at local crime laboratories. For example, Gima said he could offer a starting salary of only $3,100 a month, compared with $4,600 in Los Angeles.
