The Department of Justice is investigating the New York Police Department’s Special Victims Division over accusations it failed to collect a “large number” of rape kits, sources recently told the New York Post.
In December, sources revealed to the Post that the department allegedly abandoned possibly “hundreds” of rape kits in city hospitals, Blaze News previously reported.
If a victim chooses to “release” a rape kit to law enforcement as evidence, the NYPD’s SVD detectives are responsible for picking up the kit from the hospital and delivering it to the department’s lab in Queens for testing.
Because of a law enacted last year, hospitals in the city have begun cataloging all rape kits held in storage and alerting law enforcement about any uncollected released kits. After the NYPD was informed about the abandoned evidence, the department issued a directive for the SVP to regularly contact the city’s 60 hospitals and ensure the kits are collected “in a timely manner.”
It is still unclear how many kits were left in hospital storage and never collected by the department.
A police source recently told the Post that the DOJ is “looking at it.”
“The hospitals were calling us saying what do you want to do,” the source added. “We don’t have a count.”
“That’s forensic evidence left behind — that’s really what the issue is,” the source continued.
The DOJ initially began its investigation into the NYPD’s SVD in June 2022 over allegations that the department was engaging in “gender-biased policing.”
“There have been numerous complaints from insufficient manning, to not the best hand-picked detectives being selected, nepotism, and now the collection of rape kits has come into question in more than one instance,” the source told the Post.
A second source told the news outlet that a “full transparent investigation” needs to be conducted to reveal the total number of kits the department abandoned.
“If the NYPD did nothing wrong, a full investigation would show that. A city government cannot allow this to go on,” the second source noted.
An NYPD spokesperson told the Post that the state needs to implement a tracking system.
There “are currently no statewide tracking systems in place for the Sexual Offense Evidence Collection Kits, which leaves the possibility for kits to be left behind in hospital storage and not be tested in a timely manner,” the spokesperson stated, adding that the department will “continue to work closely with (DOJ) regarding any additional information they request.”
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