The Honolulu Police Department pushed back Thursday against criticism that it isn’t doing enough to catch rapists after it was disclosed that 1,500 rape kits collected from alleged victims of sexual assaults have gone untested.
Deputy Chief Marie McCauley told reporters at a news conference at HPD headquarters that HPD actually has a backlog of only 15 kits. Those kits were collected in 2015 and are awaiting testing.
An additional 1,500 untested rape kits, some dating to the 1990s, are being stored in a refrigerated facility in HPD’s evidence area. There are no immediate plans to test those kits.
“Cases in which the suspect is unknown, those cases are tested immediately,” she said.
McCauley explained that the rape kits are not tested when the perpetrator is already known, when the suspect admits to having sex with the victim or when an alleged victim withdraws the complaint.
McCauley stressed that HPD is sympathetic to the victims of sexual assault.
“It’s never too late to hear the words ‘I’m sorry that happened to you,’ ‘I believe you’ or ‘That was not your fault,’” McCauley said. “And that is how we feel. We take sexual assault very seriously.”
Advocates for sexual assault victims have said that all of the rape kits should be tested and put into national and state databases to help find repeat offenders. But McCauley said that HPD has lacked the resources over the years to test all of the kits.
“The 1,500 that we are holding in evidence, we would gladly test them if we get the resources to do so, if they allow us to outsource and give us some money to do so,” she said. “We have no problem testing everything.” HPD estimates that it would cost $2.3 million to test the 1,500 kits it has in storage.
She said that HPD’s lab has six staff members who are responsible for conducting forensic tests throughout the state on not just rape kits, but also on evidence from homicides, robberies and property crimes. She said the lab has been authorized to hire three additional people, which should help speed up testing.
Asked whether HPD has sought money to test the 1,500 rape kits, McCauley said, “We are constantly looking for grants and looking for funding from any source to help us do that.”
But Sen. Laura Thielen (D, Hawaii Kai-Waimanalo-Kailua), who has introduced legislation this session that would require HPD to test rape kits faster and provide public reports on any backlogs, said that there is federal money under the Violence Against Women Act available for local law enforcement agencies to fund the testing rape kits, but HPD hasn’t applied for the money.
“The federal government has said that the payoff of testing all of these kits is so great in targeting, identifying and incarcerating these serial rapists that they have been putting millions and millions of dollars into it,” Thielen said. “HPD has not applied for those funds when they could.”
Thielen said she also doesn’t trust the figures HPD has provided about the cost of testing rape kits after HPD Forensic Lab Director Wayne Kimoto told a Senate committee Wednesday that he didn’t know how many rape kits had gone untested. Kimoto told lawmakers that the department would need to hire one to two people to work full time for about a year to come up with that figure.
Hours later an HPD spokeswoman disclosed that the department did know the figure and that it was 1,500.
“I would not believe for one second any dollar figure they give us, given that their testimony (Tuesday) was completely erroneous,” Thielen said.
In regard to HPD’s news conference, Thielen said, “Instead of doing damage control, I would encourage them to do the actual work.”
