Low hanging fruit for your crime fighting pleasure. Women are NOT inconsequential—why is this so easy to ignore?
In 2015, the Obama administration launched the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative (SAKI) to encourage cities and states to send untested kits to labs, open new investigations, and prosecute the assailants who had slipped under the radar for years or decades. So far, the Justice Department has awarded $154 million to 54 jurisdictions.
And it has completely upended the conventional wisdom on rapists and how they commit their crimes.”
Lesson one: Serial rapists are common and prolific. And not so smart—they leave plenty of evidence to build conviction level cases. Since Cuyahoga County (Cleveland OH area) began forklifting its kits, prosecutors have indicted nearly 750 rapists in cold cases and convicted more than 400 of them.
Lesson two: They’re equal opportunity criminals--by DNA analysis men who rape have also been convicted of petty property crimes, non-sexual assaults or other crimes. The Case Western Reserve University research also showed that the great majority of rapists are generalists, or “one-man crime waves.” “They will steal your car, they will steal your watch, and they will steal sex, so to speak, if they can get away with it,” says Neil Malamuth, a psychologist at UCLA. “They are antisocial folks who will commit all sorts of antisocial behavior, including but not limited to sexual aggression.”
So, this is criminal justice money well spent providing a powerful return dollar for dollar. This is the opportunity to use readily available evidence, �SAKI fund financed, so it’s not coming out of the local taxpayers’ pockets, and to accomplish crime fighting relatively quickly and with certainty.
If your jurisdiction hasn’t applied for SAKI funds, why not? The 2019 deadline passed in April. And the window between announcement and deadliner is small. Review the 2019 application process in preparation for 2020 www.bja.gov/…. Now is the time to build community support and awareness in preparation for the next application round.
If your jurisdiction HAS SAKI funds what is the status? Some jurisdictions take the information and work it, some test old rape kits only to let the results sit on a different shelf. Succesful prosecution of a rapist keeps your and your family and friends safe not just from sexual assault but apparently from a variety of crimes big and small. Women are important, we all are.
My thanks to Boing Boing and the Atlantic for information.