Like this:

Yesterday I posted an article in which educators were said to be whinging about the effects of television on children. Today’s article gives an example of how life isn’t resembling television in the slightest, even though it might benefit from doing so. From the Human Rights Watch site:

Los Angeles County officials should move urgently to test a backlog of more than 12,000 rape kits – the physical evidence collected after a sexual assault – to ensure justice for rape victims, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.

Women who report being raped are asked to undergo a lengthy, extensive examination to collect DNA and other physical evidence that might identify their attacker, corroborate testimony about the assault, or connect their case to other rape crime scene evidence. The resulting rape kit is then booked into police evidence. However, although rape victims may believe it is automatically tested, that is often not the case in Los Angeles County. Rape treatment providers told Human Rights Watch that victims assumed silence from the officers investigating their case simply meant no evidence was found, or that there was no DNA match.

But Human Rights Watch analyzed data from the Los Angeles Police Department, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, and Los Angeles County’s 47 independent police departments, and found that as of March 1, 2009, there were at least 12,669 untested rape kits sitting in storage facilities. In those cases, officers never sent the kits on for forensic testing.

So…it’s not like that CSI show after all? I would agree that perhaps the blue lighting and porno music and sunglasses for the guys in Miami are a bit much, but certainly I would have thought that properly processing evidence central to the investigation of violent crime would have fit into the budget somewhere?

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