In January, during a joint session of the house and senate judiciary committees, the Colorado Bureau of Investigations revealed that 1,407 victims of sexual assault living in Colorado are currently waiting for the results of their rape test kits. They are victims, old and young, who have waited months for the evidence needed to get their attackers off the streets, yet a large backlog of cases means they will have to wait even longer for justice.
Rape test kits are invasive medical procedures conducted shortly after the time of an assault. Often described as “humiliating,” these tests involve the victim being poked, prodded and swabbed in intimate area by a doctor shortly after being raped.
After harvesting the DNA sample at a hospital, law enforcement sends the kits to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI), whose job is to process and promptly return them to law enforcement so they can be admitted as evidence. This process should take around three months. However, the current wait time is an astounding 500 days.
That means that from the time of the assault and the conducting of the test, victims must wait 500 days in virtual perpetuity, not knowing what will happen next, forced to endure suspicion about their trauma. That’s 500 days without evidence, meaning the perpetrator is still walking free on the streets, free to assault more people, something that happens all too often.
Back in January, CBI was grilled for the delays during a yearly oversight committee. More than a month later, last Monday, CBI officials, including Director Chris Schaefer, were back in the State Capitol, but this time they sat in front of the survivors they had let down, instead of bureaucrats.
The event was held by the Colorado Coalition Against Sexual Assault with assistance from State Senator Mike Weissman and State Representative Jenny Willford. Many victims were in attendance, including some of the 1,407 victims currently in the backlog.
After the CBI executives apologized, they promised to process all cases in the current backlog by the end of the year and create a public dashboard where victims can get updates on the bureau’s progress. Their new goal for kit testing times, said Director Shaefer, would be 90 days.
Schaefer, who announced his retirement shortly after the event, told the lawmakers and victims, “We are not meeting your expectations, and we’re not meeting ours.”
CBI’s wait times doubled last year, after a former lab analyst Yvonne “Missy” Woods was accused of manipulating the results of more than 1,000 rape test cases over her decades-long career. With the help of state lawmakers, the CBI is spending millions to remedy the issue and retest the manipulated cases. CBI says the Woods’ case is one of the main reasons the problem has been exacerbated.
While CBI seeks to repair its image, survivors are still living in fear of their attackers, who, in many cases, are still roaming the streets freely.
