Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/12/18/11341-abandoned-rape-kits-ide.html
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Not even a red state Southern county. The horrors.
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This one county happens to contain Detroit, a whole lot of inner suburbs and just short of 2M people. It sounds like a high number, and it is, but it would be a lower number if these rape kits hadn’t been tossed into the “cold case” bin.
Kim Worthy is dancing around the reason why the kits weren’t tested in that Freep interview. Misogyny and racism are two sides of the same ugly coin which kept these kits from getting tested. I wish she had just come out and said it unambiguously.
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I have never been able to wrap my head around this issue, and my baseline is that 99% of all people are horrible.
But on processing rape kits, I would think that even horrible people would gather together and say, “Let’s not be horrible about this one thiing.”
I don’t know… Maybe it’s 99.9%
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I think a part of this that isn’t getting enough emphasis is the concept that there are people walking around raping people today because these kits were shelved. In my mind that makes the police who failed to process them complicit in the rapes that are happening today, and have happened for the past 8 years.
If they had cared enough to process them, did so, and caught the perpetrators years ago, how many people would have been spared being the victim of a horrible crime?
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If we assume each rapist lives in Wayne county, then this means that if everyone attending a sold-out Detroit Lions game at Ford Field were Wayne country residents (which isn’t an unreasonable possibility), you could expect to find around 30 serial rapists in the audience. Now imagine how many in the audience are just one-time offenders!
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That interview pretty clearly says White victims get investigations while Black ones do not.
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…or how many may be part of the police force.
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Reason number fucking whatever I can’t even keep track anymore of why I hate people.
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I don’t know if it makes it better, or if it makes it worse, that police are not like most people.
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And these are only the people who reported the rape and had the rape kit done. How many more people were raped and didn’t report it for whatever reason? (like they knew nothing would happen because they weren’t lily white and well connected)
Just ugh.
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This is just beyond horrifying. One of the more obvious ways that the criminal justice system in the US is completely fucked.
…also…
And this is the thing - cops are highly unconcerned about rape in part because they’re highly likely to be rapists themselves. There’s a strong correlation between domestic abuse and rape, and the vast majority of police are self-reported domestic abusers, according to mental health surveys they used to give cops (but don’t anymore - presumably because the results were so damning). Police are really the last people you’d want dealing with rape cases.
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That’s a whole lot of words where only two are necessary. Prosecutor is an elected position in this state, so I get why she used too many words, but I do still wish she didn’t have to.
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That is a lot of rapes. Jesus Christ.
My Latin is shaky but it their state motto on their seal really: “If you require a peninsula to love, look around you”? Ye gods.
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Too bad that all the “tough on crime” politicians don’t see the potential political goldmine here. Fully funding the processing of all these backlogged and abandoned kits around the country would lead to actual criminals being actually convicted. Hurrah! Wins all around.
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Rise is the group that drafted and passed the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Bill of Rights unanimously through Congress. They are now working on getting the same rights in all 50 states.
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It’s actually “If you seek a pleasant peninsula look about you”.
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Wayne County is 673 square miles. 817 rapists, 673 square miles… that’s 1.2 rapists per square mile.
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