By:  Serach NIssim

The Department of Justice has its hands full with a sprawling probe into the New York Police Department’s Special Victim’s Division.

As reported by the NY Post, the Special Victims Division failed to analyze rape kits, leaving them instead in storage at multiple hospitals across the city.  The shocking oversight means that an unknown number of cases were not fully investigated, potentially leaving countless rapists to roam free.  “The Department of Justice is looking at it,” a police source said, adding that a “large number” of the kits weren’t picked up by Special Victims Division detectives and taken for analysis at the NYPD’s lab in Queens.  In early Dec., the Post first reported that the forensic kits — which contain semen, saliva, and other evidence taken from reported rape victims — were found abandoned at about 60 hospitals across the city.

The NYPD has still not given a number for how many kits were found, when hospital employees cataloged storage areas so as to comply with a new state law requiring evidence be sent to an upstate facility.  “The hospitals were calling us saying what do you want to do,” the source said. “We don’t have a count.”  The abandoned evidence, left to gather dust, could have been utilized to help catch serial rapists with modern-day technology like DNA cloning, which is used in cases where there wasn’t enough evidence to find a match at the time of the crime.  “That’s forensic evidence left behind — that’s really what the issue is,” a police source told the Post.  Moving forward, the NYPD assigned detectives from the Special Victims Division to regularly call city hospitals to make sure the evidence was collected.

The federal probe was first launched in response to 19 rape survivors who signed a letter in 2021 pointing to a rape-kit mess-up.  “Even if you have one victim, that’s one victim who may never get justice because they have been failed by the NYPD,” said Leslie McFadden, one of the signees of the letter, who was raped in 2015 in Brooklyn.  Some 70 percent of women who say they were raped don’t pursue charges, per police sources. Those who do, must face an invasive physical exam that is often be retraumatizing, McFadden said.  “It is not an easy or quick process, and to go through that process survivors need to be able to trust the system.  They need to be able to expect that their kits will be tested in a timely manner if they choose to report it to the police,” she added. “That is not what has happened here, and that is unconscionable.”

The ongoing probe into the NYPD’s Special Victims Division began in June 2022 to determine whether the unit engaged in gender-biased policing.  The federal probe was to review the procedures, policies, and training for investigations of sexual assault crimes, including how they interact with victims, collect evidence, and complete investigations, per the Post.

An NYPD spokesperson commented saying, there “are currently no statewide tracking systems in place for the Sexual Offense Evidence Collection Kits, which leaves the possibility for kits to be left behind in hospital storage and not be tested in a timely manner.”  The department also said it would “continue to work closely with (DOJ) regarding any additional information they request.”