Sexual assault evidence is tied to known criminals

The Honolulu Police Department has matched some of the DNA profiles obtained from 180 recently processed rape kits with potential perpetrators in a national offender database — a development that could lead to solving years-old crimes or prevent serial sex offenders from committing new ones.

The 180 kits are the first of hundreds of old rape kits that law enforcement agencies are beginning to test after acknowledging last year that they had tested only a small fraction of the evidence kits submitted to them as part of investigations over the years. From the 1990s to 2016, only 13 percent of 2,240 rape kits were tested.

The kits contain swabs of bodily fluid, hair, clothing and other potential sources of DNA evidence collected in the hours or days after an alleged assault during a painstaking process that can last several hours.

The 180 recently tested kits involve cases in which the rapist was a stranger, the victim was a minor, a serial offender was suspected or there were multiple suspects involved.

Of the kits, 25 percent resulted in a DNA profile that could be uploaded to the federal database, known as CODIS, according to HPD spokeswoman Michelle Yu. The remaining kits either had insufficient DNA or yielded a DNA profile that matched the victim.

Yu would not say how many of the 45 usable DNA profiles resulted in a match with someone in the national offender database. She did not release any further details about the cases. She said HPD is reviewing the matches to see whether they lead to advances in any investigations.

“After this work has been completed, more information will be released,” said Yu. “Releasing the stats without additional information would be premature and could cause confusion and possibly give false hope to victims.”

HPD began receiving the first test results in December.

Police officials didn’t respond to interview requests for this story, including a request to speak with someone from the HPD lab about why only 25 percent of kits tested resulted in a usable DNA profile.

In a sampling of other cities that have processed untested kits, usable DNA profiles have ranged between 25 percent and 59 percent. Ilse Knecht, director of policy and advocacy for the Joyful Heart Foundation, a national organization that advocates for processing untested rape kits, said that on average about half of kits tested result in usable DNA profiles, and about half of those usually result in hits in the federal offender database.

Knecht said that there can be multiple factors that go into lower rates of resulting DNA profiles, including how the forensic evidence was collected and how it was stored.

Hawaii’s law enforcement agencies are not alone in neglecting to test rape kits that are submitted to them for investigation. Tens of thousands of the forensic evidence kits have languished in evidence rooms for years in cities and counties throughout the country, according to national news reports. Growing pressure from victim advocacy groups, as well as policies put in place under the Obama administration, have resulted in cities processing thousands of kits. The results have helped solve cold cases and identified serial rapists, and could help exonerate the wrongly accused.

Hawaii’s county police departments are sending hundreds of kits to labs on the mainland for testing this year. The state Attorney General’s Office contracted to send 500 kits to labs in February. In total, law enforcement determined in December that 1,443 kits would be tested. However, the total is expected to change based on additional information provided by the police departments, Josh Wisch, a spokesman for the Attorney General’s Office, told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser this week. He did not elaborate.