Dozens of police departments throughout Los Angeles County routinely have not tested DNA evidence collected in rape and sexual assault cases, and are unable to accurately account for thousands of pieces of evidence that could potentially help solve crimes, according to a report to be released today.
The county's two behemoth law enforcement agencies -- the Los Angeles Police Department and the Sheriff's Department -- have come under harsh criticism in recent months for not testing about 10,000 samples of semen, saliva and other genetic material gathered from victims' bodies after alleged attacks and for letting legal time limits pass on hundreds of cases. The report, produced by the independent group Human Rights Watch, found that the other 47 police agencies in the county are struggling with the same problems.
Rape victims "have a right to expect police to do all they can to thoroughly investigate their case, but in L.A. [County] they often feel betrayed to learn that their rape kits are never even tested," said Sarah Tofte, the report's author. "And in some cases, failure to test means that a rapist who could have been arrested will remain free."
In all, the outlying police departments, which rely on the county's crime laboratory for DNA testing without charge, were found to have nearly 2,750 of the so-called rape kits sitting untested in storage freezers -- some more than two decades old. The agencies were also estimated to have destroyed about 1,500 other kits after determining the evidence was no longer of use, the report found.
Gail Abarbanel, director of the Rape Treatment Center at the Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center, expressed dismay at Tofte's findings.
"It's shocking," she said. "The disregard for this evidence and the reluctance to use it in cases reflects the deep and really troubling level of discrimination that persists against victims of rape."
Officials from several of the police departments challenged the way Tofte construed the figures, which the agencies provided in response to her requests made under the state's Public Records Act.
The Long Beach Police Department, for example -- which is by far the largest of the 47 agencies surveyed -- failed to test more than half of the 1,900 evidence kits it has booked into storage since 1995, according to the report. Long Beach Deputy Chief William Blair, however, said that what Tofte presented as the number of untested kits there was actually the total number of kits -- tested and untested -- in storage.
