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There is a national dilemma on this, and a real debate of whether
in particular detest sexual assault kits from acquaintance rapes.
And we did a cost benefit analysis of this, found for
every $1 you spend testing a sexual assault kit you save
$81 on average, to avert future sexual assaults.
There's always been a moral argument to test this large backlog of sexual
assault kits and now we buttress that argument with a strong economic argument.
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Unfortunately what has happened often in the past,
is that the hospital sends the kit to the police department.
And there are currently around 400,000 sexual assault kits
just sitting in warehouses in police departments throughout the country.
So think about that 400,000 sexual assault victims
go through this incredibly unpleasant exam after a traumatic sexual assault.
They do it so that they hope they will find the offender by doing this.
And then they kit just is sitting around, and they never investigate it at all.
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When a victim of a sexual assault goes to the police department,
the police encourage them to go to the hospital to get a medical forensic exam.
And there the nurses try to get some foreign DNA from the victim, and they take
these swabs and put them in a box, and that's called the sexual assault kit.
And then the hospital sends it back to the police department.
And ideally what happens at that point is that the police
department sends it to a lab, the lab tries to get DNA from these swabs.
If they get DNA, they run it against the national database of felons.
And they try to get a hit, and if they get a hit against that database, so
the DNA in the swab is the same as the DNA in the database, then ideally this hit
would become a conviction, you'd actually put someone in jail.
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The cost of testing a sexual assault kit is around $1,600.
And the average amount that we save by testing it is around $130,000,
which is 81 times bigger than the 1,600.
So, again, every $1 we spend we're saving about $81.
That's an incredibly conservative number,
the actual number instead of 81 is probably a couple thousand.
Because the chances of conviction now are much higher than they were in
the data that we estimated from New York,
because the statute of limitations are much larger now in most states.
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There's many other benefits from testing these kits that we didn't quantify.
So one big one is we didn't quantify the costs associated with nonsexual crime.
Which are actually larger than the costs associated with future sexual assaults
because these people on average commit more nonsexual crimes than sexual crimes.
It also brings closure to the victims.
It also, an interesting study people find that it helps deter future crimes.
If you actually get the kit and you put this person into the database,
that once this person finds out there in the database,
they will commit fewer future crimes.
There are some people out there that are just serial sexual offenders,
and not just sexual offenders but many other violent nonsexual felons.
And we have the technology, we have the wherewithal,
we know how to get them off the street, we just haven't done it.
And there's an easy way to get some of these people off the street, and
we should do it.
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