The Long Beach Police Department received a $11,221 grant from the California Department of Justice to process untested sexual assault evidence backlogs, which the Long Beach City Council accepted at its Tuesday, April 20 meeting.
LBPD’s Sex Crimes Detail performed a recent audit on Sexual Assualt Response Team (SART) kits from 2009 to 2020 and found that 46 cases with forensic evidence “may not have been processed,” according to a City staff report.
The Sex Crimes Detail will now be tasked with auditing SART kits from 2000 to 2008 to verify whether or not forensic evidence was processed. If not, the group will determine whether the kits meet current criteria for examination based on current laws and “the will of the reported victim.”
In a 2020 audit by the office of Attorney General Xavier Becerra, law enforcement agencies and crime laboratories across the state reported a total of 13,929 untested sexual assault exam kits as of Jan. 1, 2020.
Of those, 11,654 (83.7%) were related to a reported case of assault. Another 345 (2.5%) were not related to assault and the remaining 1,930 (13.9%) were unknown or the department’s response was unclear.
Approximately a third of kits were untested because the victim did not pursue prosecution.
The audit states a variety of reasons why a kit may not be tested: the victim did not pursue prosecution, the case could not be investigated or prosecuted, the case was adjudicated, the case was active, the analysis was unlikely to yield a DNA profile, the kit belongs to another jurisdiction, there was no crime, the crime was something other than rape, or the cause was unknown.
The State’s Untested Sexual Assault Evidence Grant Backlog Reduction Program was approved in the Budget Act of 2018. A total of $1.814 million was available for grants.
The approximately $11,000 grant to the Long Beach Police Department will pay for 140 total hours of overtime for four detectives, one sergeant, one special service officer and one property clerk from evidence control to audit, research and review the SART inventory, as well as the 46 potentially untested kits already located.
