he Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department

[RNM]

LOS ANGELES — The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department says it no longer has the staff or funds to continue analyzing its decades-long backlog of DNA evidence from thousands of rape and sexual assault cases.

In a report issued last week, Sheriff Lee Baca said federal grant money will cover only four or five more months of testing, and state funds are uncertain after that.

Baca has said he needs $4.5 million to clear the backlog.

A new effort to clear the backlog began in November, when it was revealed that more than 4,000 sexual assault kits sat untested in county storage.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,528601,00.html

That is crazy; and almost more crazy is the November story (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/11/12/state/n203921S34.DTL)

[DAL]

This appears to be a ploy for more funding.

I am sure that LASD will resume testing if you send them the money for it. Or maybe women's groups will supply some funds.

[mdrdep]

And now for the truth. This was money that never needed to be spent. Prior to the change of policy this past year it was up to the handling detective to request the kits to be processed. If there was no need to process the kit, the kit did not get processed. Now the kit gets processed no matter what. So take a case where the suspect is known to the victim (date rape, spousal rape, in family child molestation) and the suspect pleads out to the charge, this kit would not be processed and there is no extra cost to the county. But now this kit will be processed for no good reason. If you think that we're going to get DNA that can be compared to other sex assaults by processing this kit, think again. We already got the suspects DNA into the criminal database when he was booked so the kit is not introducing anything new.