Sneak Preview: DOJ Aims To Improve Assault Kit Program Data
(The following was excerpted from a recent Thompson Grants Compliance Expert article.) By the end of the year, a Department of Justice’s (DOJ) bureau will implement new guidelines for National Sexual Assault Kit (SAK) Initiative grant recipients detailing they should submit certified forms that accurately state their inventory of SAKs, in response to a recent DOJ Office of Inspector General (OIG) audit recommendation.
The SAK Initiative provides grants to state, local and tribal law enforcement agencies and prosecutors’ offices to inventory, track and test previously collected but unprocessed SAKs. Testing forensic evidence in a SAK potentially extracts DNA profiles that can be uploaded into the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) to identify a potential sexual assailant and establish links to serial sex offenders.
From 2015 to 2021, the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) within DOJ’s Office of Justice Programs (OJP) provided more than $266 million in funding to 75 grantees in 40 states and Washington, D.C. Grant recipients, other than small agencies, are required to implement a comprehensive sexual assault response program, which includes: (1) identifying and inventorying all unsubmitted SAKs; (2) creating a working group to assess the causes of the SAK backlog; and (3) designating a program coordinator to serve as the working group’s central point of contact.
Grantees under the program are required to inventory all unsubmitted SAKs in its jurisdiction. OIG found that grantees have identified 136,060 unsubmitted SAKs and tested 81,563 of them. As of June 2021, grant recipients have uploaded 29,207 DNA profiles into CODIS and received 13,531 hits, including 1,875 linked to serial sex offenders, resulting in 189 convictions and 795 guilty pleas. However, grantees still have more than 50,000 SAKs awaiting testing.
OIG also determined that BJA has not established a process to ensure the information recipients report on the SAK inventory form is accurate and complete. For each SAK, grantees are required to report on the following data elements: the age of the victim, offense date, SAK collection date and the law enforcement incident or case number associated with the SAK. A recipient may use 25% of its program funding to conduct this inventory, and once it has certified that its inventory is accurate and complete, it then may receive its remaining 75% of its program funds.
OIG found that four of five grantees it evaluated indicated on the certification form that the required SAK-related information was included in the inventory. However, one recipient could not provide evidence to support the age of the victim, offense date and whether the SAK collection data were being tracked. Another included the incident number on the certification form, but did not track the other data elements. “Without checking source information, BJA does not know if grantees are properly tracking the [required] data elements,” OIG explained. “In addition, incorrect SAK inventories can result in inaccurate data being reported [in the OJP Performance Measurement Tool (PMT) database], and BJA officials not having accurate indication of the number of SAKs needing to be processed in a grantee’s backlog.”
(The full version of this story has now been made available to all for a limited time here.)
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