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"In 2009, a Wayne County assistant prosecuting attorney noticed thousands of rape kits stacked on the shelves of a Detroit Police Department storage facility. The kits are used to collect and store DNA evidence obtained from sexual assault survivors. These particular kits had been in storage for up to 30 years, and their contents had never been processed or properly investigated."

This is appalling. One would expect solving rape and murder to be the highest priority for the police.

A quick Google shows that in 2013 there were over 3000 arrests for marijuana possession in the same county. The resources used to make those arrests could have been used instead to investigate and prosecute the perpetrators identified by those rape kits. Victims of violent crime are now also victims of the war on drugs.

> The resources used to make those arrests could have been used instead to investigate and prosecute the perpetrators identified by those rape kits.

In theory, yes. In practice, no, they couldn't, because police officers aren't generally qualified to be processing and/or investigating rape kits.

We can't even say that they should have hired fewer officers and spent the money on people qualified to investigate these cases instead, because the LEO unions ensure that those cops stay employed (and also explicitly lobby for drug criminalization so that those officers have work to do).

EDIT clarified "criminalization" wording

Do you mean lobby for drug criminalization?
Lobby against drug decriminalization, since it is already criminalized.
We're talking about a city where 911 calls cannot reliably expect to get timely responses. Given that immediate need situations don't have good coverage, one should not be surprised that <insert other thing here> is not handled particularly well.
Rather cynically, a marijuana possession charge is probably a lot easier to stick than a rape charge. Caught the suspect with MJ in possession = open and shut case, no expensive tests or investigation necessary, not much possibility of a defense. In the case of rape, proving beyond reasonable doubt that the suspect is the right person and that the sex really was non-consentual, if the suspect fights it, could be much tougher and more expensive. It isn't too hard to believe that the legal system would rather take the easier case than the more serious crime.
"But some skeptics of these types of partnerships say that private citizens already pay taxes and should not be expected to pay for added expenditures that are the responsibility of the government."

Sort of, but no. The entire problem with Detroit is you draw arbitrary lines on the ground, and allow people and capital to flow freely across those lines, but don't allow taxes to flow across those lines.

A lot of untested rape kits are untested because there is no actual controversy over whether or not sex happened or with whom, just over whether it was consensual.
That's what I was getting at with my comment: there are reasonable scenarios wherein testing a rape kit serves no clear purpose.

I'm all for the paradigm of testing them, but I'm not for spending money on cases where there's no contest of sex happening, or the perpetrator confesses.

On the one hand, I'm really strongly in favor of this, but there's one thing that makes me question the 100% test coverage paradigm: what happens when a kit is collected, but police use other methods (victim testimony, security footage, eyewitness accounts, etc.) to apprehend the perpetrator? That doesn't seem like an instance where a kit necessarily must be tested.
In a case like that, why not test the kit anyway just to be sure? If it matches the suspect, then you can rest even easier knowing you got the right person. If it doesn't, then you've avoided imprisoning an innocent.

The cost of the test is about the same as a few days of imprisoning the accused, who will probably be put away for many years, so there's no sense trying to trim costs there.

Because it costs 1500$ perhaps?
Seriously.. To agree with a sibling poster, $1500 is a paltry fee to pay to be sure that you imprison the right person. Especially since it isn't a trivial charge either. $1500 is also dwarfed by the amount it will cost to imprison the suspect for the duration of their sentence should they be convicted.
Maybe the kits don't really "make you sure". What do you know about them?
It is better to spend that 1500 and make sure to send the right person to jail (even if it is redundant) than take a chance with eyewitness testimony. 1,500$ is nothing compared to the life and freedom of someone.
What if the rapist already confessed? 1500$ would buy a police officer a nice computer. In many countries the police lags far behind the criminals in technical equipment.

Edit: hit HN's comment limit again. Anyway: consider this - what if the test isn't 100% reliable? What makes you think it is - because you want to believe that 100% truth can be established? What if it has a false negative rate of 30%, so 30% of actual rapists (who might already have confessed) would be cleared by the test?

> What if the rapist already confessed?

Revealing innocents pressured into plea deals would have social value. Were you under the impression that innocent people never confess?

IMHO, an individual's life and freedom is worth way more than any dollar amount, but that is just my opinion.

That said: DNA tests are far more reliable than eyewitness accounts. Innocent people confess to crimes all the time.

I did explicitly mention cost savings in my comment....

You'll easily be spending 100x that much on the trial and imprisonment. Spending an extra 1% to get some hard physical evidence seems like cheap insurance.

Doesn't it depend on the circumstances? Sometimes the kit might not reveal any useful information. You assume because it is some sciency sounding thing it will give you 100% information, but what do you actually know about those kits? They might also just yield some likelihood or even false pointers. Why do you automatically assume the police chose to ignore important evidence? The article doesn't tell us anything about that.
If they're not useful then don't collect them. There's no circumstance where it makes sense to collect them but not test them. I don't think this dichotomy rests on any assumptions about how they work or what information they give.

I'm sure there are some circumstances where testing the kit is completely redundant. But how often does that happen? If it's rare, why bother carving out an exception?

What makes you think it is rare? Maybe most of the time the rapists confess without the need to use the kit (maybe the existence of the kit is enough to make them confess, so no need to actually process it). And maybe collecting the information from the kits is just standard procedure, like photographing crime scenes, taking finger prints, and so on (all the stuff we see on TV).
Or when both people accept that sex happened, but one says it was consensual while the other says it wasn't.
100% is a reasonable goal.

Victims and Eyewitnesses can and do make mistakes. Security footage can show someone who looks like a suspect but DNA (when properly tested) provides irrefutable proof.

In many cases, especially old cases for which there have already been convictions, prosecutors are highly resistant to the idea of testing the DNA because they can lead to overturned convictions.

> Victims and Eyewitnesses can and do make mistakes. Security footage can show someone who looks like a suspect but DNA (when properly tested) provides irrefutable proof.

DNA (when properly tested) can provide a substantial degree of certainty of whether the person from whom the material in one sample came was the same as the person from whom the material in another sample came (and can provide an even greater certainty that that is not the case.)

Of course, the provenance of at least one of the samples in a normal criminal investigation is itself to subject to all kinds of uncertainties which are resolved to what amounts to testimony of witnesses (in documentary form) to various steps in the process. So, in the sense that witnesses are fallible or potentially malicious, it doesn't actually eliminate that problem.

Rapists often repeat the crime on new victims. Even in such a situation as you suggest where the kit is not needed to prosecute a given crime, the data from the kit could be useful in unsolved cases for which a kit was processed but no suspect was identified.
If you're testing all the kits, you may find you have information you didn't know you had - like the presence of a rapist in rapes they hadn't been suspected of.
It's one thing to go after the rapists after all these years, but how about also going after the police officers, captains and chiefs that approved of stashing evidence of major sex crimes on shelves? There are surely many cases where the rapists, because their crimes weren't prosecuted the first time, went on and re-offended due to this criminal negligence. The moral bankruptcy is pretty high here.
This is government failure 101

Maybe we need a startup that reduces the cost from $1500 to $150

From the article, they've already managed to negotiate the price to $490 (through, I assume, a bulk discount).

Some of the testing has already been funded by the state of Detroit (albeit very late) and the federal government.

At $150 per kit it would still cost the group $1.7 million to test every kit. Not to mention that a large part of the expense is projected to be the cost of getting detectives to investigate and arrest based on the results of the tests, which private industry probably can't provide.

At $150 per test there would be no backlog and rapists might not be allowed to become repeat offenders.

This is not just some situation where as long as it is eventually done, that is all that matters.

Time is critical. This was failure.

This article doesn't go into these details. I recall reading in prior articles on this, that many of these kits are processed by private labs.

Even the tests are done by the state, the costs will largely be related to the expense of the technology which was likely created by a bio-tech startup.

Why the hell does it cost $1500? 23andMe does their test for $199.
The threshold for standing in court as proof, compared to giving you some statistical averages, might differ.