Travis Hampton, state police superintendent at the time, praised his agency’s forensic work and said they’d achieved “remarkable results on a very demanding and technically challenging project,” eliminating a backlog of almost 5,700 kits in just three years.
Then-Gov. Kate Brown called the project, boosted by the help of private labs that tested a majority of the warehoused kits, “the perfect example of what can happen when diverse stakeholders work together to right a wrong.”
And Kevin Campbell, executive director of the Oregon Association Chiefs of Police, had already assured state lawmakers that “we have protocols now so we are not going to develop a future backlog.”
Six years later, the backlog is back.
The state police forensic lab saw steady annual increases in not only the number of sexual assault evidence kits awaiting testing but also in the turnaround time to process them, according to the agency’s latest dashboard. The backlog peaked at 1,100 last December, roughly four times higher than the total from January 2019. Turnaround times in December averaged 244 days, more than three times higher than in January 2019.
State police now say the backlog has fallen to 810 as of July, although turnaround times increased slightly.
The backlog of untested sexual assault kits has returned without meaningful oversight in recent years from the Legislature, which in 2016 passed a reform bill, known as “Melissa’s Law,” to ensure the timely testing of kits. Lawmakers have been kept in the dark about problems because annual reports produced by Oregon State Police never made it to them due to bureaucratic breakdowns.
Sen. Sara Gelser Blouin, D- Corvallis and one of the chief sponsors of Melissa’s Law, said she only became aware of the renewed backlog this month, after The Oregonian/OregonLive made inquiries with state police and the Legislature. She thought the backlog had been resolved years ago.
“That is absolutely devastating,” she said. “Survivors of sexual assault desperately need for these kits to be processed faster. …I was just shocked to see those numbers.”
Delays in testing evidence from sexual assault kits, which are collected by local law enforcement and processed by the Oregon State Police’s forensic labs, can result in missed opportunities to make arrests, help identify and stop serial rapists, rapidly exclude some suspects and exonerate others. Making that information quickly available can also avoid re-traumatization of victims by the justice system.
Danielle Tudor, who was attacked in Portland by “Jogger Rapist” Richard Gillmore in 1979 when she was 17 and later lobbied for Melissa’s Law, said she’s disappointed to learn of the renewed backlog. Oregon State Police “should have waved the white flag and said, ‘We need help,’” she said.
“The reality is when you’re the tester of those kits,” she said, “the buck stops with you.”
State Sen. Tim Knopp, R- Bend, who was critical of the state in 2016 for taking so long to address the past backlog, said he’s also disturbed by the current situation.
“The backlog on sexual assault kits is unacceptable,” he said in an email. “If the issue is staffing, the Legislature needs to provide the funds necessary to stay current. The justice and the safety of Oregonians depends on it!”
Oregon State Police say they, too, are frustrated by the festering backlog but insist they’ve done all they can to keep it from growing even larger.
Agency officials blame vacancies and post-pandemic staffing issues at the lab for falling behind. The lab struggled to retain workers and fill vacancies even though it received annual supplemental funding of $1.5 million from the Legislaturebeginning in 2016 to hire more crime lab technicians, plus $600,000 in federal “capacity enhancement and backlog reduction” grants since 2021 to pay for overtime and other improvements.
Its DNA and biology units are “finally fully staffed” with 33 scientists, including seven newly hired technicians in the DNA unit who are in various stages of an 18- to 24- month training program, Capt. Kyle Kennedy, a spokesperson for the Oregon State Police, said in emailed answers to questions.
Once they are fully trained, “this will more than double our DNA production capacity and we anticipate a significant improvement in the backlog and turn-around times,” he said, adding that a team within the DNA unit is dedicated to processing only sexual assault kits.
The number of vacancies in the unit has fluctuated and managers couldn’t in good faith ask the Legislature for more positions when it wasn’t yet staffed to the authorized level, he said. Meanwhile, it isn’t easy to find accredited labs outside the criminal justice system to accelerate testing, he said, and doing so “often provides more drawbacks than it does advantages.”
Nevertheless, tapping outside labs is exactly what police departments in three of Oregon’s most populous counties did years ago to clear their original backlogs.
Prompted by the newsroom’s reporting, lawmakers plan to call in Oregon State Police for their first in-person update on the backlog in several years. Kevin Moore, an aide to Sen. Floyd Prozanski, D- Eugene and chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the committee plans to hold a hearing in September.
A sexual assault kit, otherwise referred to in Oregon as a SAFE kit, is a package of items medical professionals use to gather and preserve biological evidence when investigating allegations of sexual assault. The kits typically contain hair and body fluids from victims who undergo forensic medical exams. If an attacker leaves behind blood, semen, saliva or hair, lab scientists can identify a DNA profile to provide police with leads in unsolved cases. Lab technicians seek to extract biological evidence and DNA profilescollected from the kits, each of which can be used to link a person to a crime.
Amid a nationwide outcry over untested rape kits, Oregon lawmakers passed Melissa’s Law to address the backlog here, which included some kits that sat untested on property warehouse shelves of local police departments for at least 30 years. Testing those kits resulted in at least 880 DNA profiles added to a federal database and at least 448 hits, or matches, to DNA profiles already in the federal database by 2019. In Multnomah County alone, prosecutors identified more than a dozen prosecutions as of 2020.
There is no national database that tracks state backlogs of sexual assault kits. But Oregon was among five states that had previously announced the clearing of their backlogs, only to show substantial backlogs of untested kits awaiting analysis as of 2022, according to a survey of 30 reporting states and Washington, D.C., done by USAFacts, a not-for-profit organization and website that collects data from government agencies. The formal definition of a backlogged SAFE kit varies by state, with Oregon setting the standard at a 30-day turnaround to complete testing. Of the 23 states that reported on crime lab backlogs, 10 reported significant reductions between 2018 and 2022, and in the case of Connecticut and South Dakota, no backlog at all.
The number of kits awaiting testing in Oregon grew significantly from 2020 through 2023. But lawmakers never found out.
Melissa’s Law required Oregon State Police to write annual reports documenting the backlog. Agency officials complied.
But for such statutorily mandated reports, agencies are also required to send an executive summary to every member of the Legislature and a copy of the full report to a specific legislative email so they get posted online. That didn’t happen.
Melissa’s Law also required Oregon State Police to send a copy of the report to the interim legislative committees related to the judiciary. From 2021 to 2023, Brian Medlock, the forensic services division director, sent the annual reports to a single staffer for the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mike Reiley, and specifically asked him to disseminate them properly or provide the best point of contact to do so, according to emails provided by Oregon State Police.
Reiley never forwarded the reports to other lawmakers or committee members, legislative officials acknowledge, and they weren’t posted online. He didn’t respond to emails and phone calls.
“As this was not the typical process, it was not forwarded on to lawmakers,” said Amie Fender-Sosa, an analyst in the Legislative Policy and Research Office who responded on his behalf.
Kennedy said agency officials thought they had complied with all reporting obligations.
The reports from state police, and intended for lawmakers, documented a variety of challenges.
“The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic were noticeable, however, the laboratory was able to avoid substantial backlogs,” the agency wrote in 2020, noting 279 untested kits and a turnaround time of 74 days.
“Unfortunately the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the SAFE kit backlog,” state police wrote in 2021, highlighting 414 untested kits and a turnaround time of 117 days.
“Unfortunately, staffing challenges within the biology and DNA sections negatively impacted the SAFE kit backlog in 2022,” the agency wrote a year later, reporting 817 untested kits and a turnaround time of 148 days.
“As of December 31, 2023, the FSD had custody of 900 sexual assault kits pending analysis,” state police wrote early this year, noting that the average turn-around time had increased to 233 days in 2023.
Oregon State Police this week publishedan online dashboard quantifying untested kits and turnaround times. The specific numbers differ substantially from what the agency wrote in its annual reports but show the same general worsening trends until improving in recent months.
Kennedy could not immediately account for the discrepancies.
Beyond annual reports, Melissa’s Law also established a 21-day deadline for local police to collect and submit SAFE kits to the state police lab and required the state to test all kits provided by an identified victim, with results to be entered into a national database “as soon as practicable.” In addition, the law funded the creation of an online portalwhere rape victims can access information about the status of evidence.
The law is named after 14-year-old Melissa Bittler, who was sexually assaulted and killed in Northeast Portland in December 2001. Sexual assault kits from at least two other young teensattacked by the same rapist four years earlier sat on the Portland Police Bureau’s evidence shelves until detectives investigating Bittler’s death noticed similarities in the attacks, discovered the kits and submitted them to a lab. It took another rape before Portland police would connect the cases.
Mary Bittler, who helped lobby for the law in her daughter’s name, said learning of the new backlog is discouraging.
“When I stop to think about all these potential victims who have had this trauma fall on them and nothing is getting done, it’s disheartening,” she said.
She said she hopes the state police can get the new forensic scientists trained to tackle the backlog and reduce the wait for testing of sexual assault evidence and return to the turnaround time of 32 days reported by state police in 2019.
Of the 800-some sexual assault kits in Oregon’s backlog as of late July, more than 90 percent had been in the lab for more than 30 days. About 100 of those kits needed initial biological sampling and about 700 awaited DNA analysis.
The oldest kit was 284 days old, from the Springfield Police Department, according to the crime lab. Springfield Police Lt. George Crolly said he knows that biological analysis was completed on that kit and suspects the state lab may be conducting further analysis.
Portland police, the largest source of such evidence, is waiting for the state police crime lab to process more than 200 sexual assault kits. The oldest was obtained in October 2023, according to Terri Wallo Strauss, a police spokesperson.
Melissa’s Law does allow Oregon State Police to prioritize testing to meet a trial deadline. “To our knowledge,” Kennedy said, “we have expedited for and met all trial date deadlines.”
Brandy Selover, executive director of the Beaverton-based Sexual Assault Resource Center, said delays of seven months or more in analyzing biological evidence from sexual assault kits could re-traumatize victims.
Lengthy timelines may interfere with a victim’s ability “to be present at work, in their family and more,” impacting jobs, education and a healthy family environment, she said in an email. In some cases, victims may “give up” on the process just to move forward with their own healing.
“If you recognize you have staffing issues in your particular lab, why not shift funding to get it sent out to other labs to do the same processing,” asked Selover, who retired as a sex assault detective from Nampa police in Idaho.
Shannon Rose, executive director of the nonprofit Oregon Sexual Assault Task Force, said state police are part of the group’s medical forensic committee and they have shared information at quarterly meetings about “massive turnover” in staffing and recruitment difficulties at the state crime lab.
“Delays of these kinds can add an extra layer of trauma for survivors. Coming forward to get a kit and a forensic exam is very difficult to do, considering how invasive it is,” she said. “So whenever someone comes forward, there is a trust and an expectation that these kits will be tested in a timely manner.”
Campbell, who represents the Oregon chiefs of police and sheriffs associations and told lawmakers in 2018 that a backlog wouldn’t return, this week said the protocol the state adopted under Melissa’s Law was intended to prevent “avoidable delays’' in collecting and delivering the sexual assault kits to a lab for analysis. The recruitment challenges and staffing vacancies in the state police crime labs were unanticipated and reflect “an issue currently affecting the entire public safety sector,” he said.
The state police lab is struggling to complete timely analysis of evidence from an assortment of crimes beyond sexual assault, which last year comprised only 6 percent of all requests.
Across all its disciplines — which include field investigations, toxicology, latent fingerprints, blood alcohol and firearms analysis — the division’s sole key performance measure is the percentage of requests completed within 30 days of receipt.
The longstanding goal is to complete 80 percent of requests within 30 days. The division has made no progress against that goal and is still completing only about a quarter of analysis requests within 30 days. Its new goal is to hit the 80 percent benchmark by 2037.
Other states have put hard deadlines on the turnaround times for labs processing sexual assault kits, according to a 2016 “best practices” report by the U.S. Department of Justice. In Connecticut and Kentucky, it’s 60 days. In Washington, D.C., Idaho and Michigan, it’s 90 days. And in California and Florida, it’s 120 days.
An initial draft of Melissa’s Law did include a six month deadline for the lab to complete its analysis of SAFE kits – a deadline some advocates had sought to hold officials accountable.
But that requirement didn’t make it into the bill that was introduced, let alone into the law.
When the Legislature voted to pass Melissa’s Law in 2016, then-state Rep. Ann Lininger, D- Lake Oswego, said that allowing state police to prioritize kits for testing without a specified turnaround time was a “smart approach” because it doesn’t “substitute our judgment” for that of the state police.
Gelser Blouin said it might be worth considering again, as long as lawmakers set a realistic deadline for the lab to achieve.
“It’s a question worth looking into … if that’s what’s required to keep their eye on it,” she said. “What gets measured gets done. And what gets talked about gets addressed.”
©2024 Advance Local Media LLC, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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