Fort Worth Police Department secures grant to tackle DNA backlog
FORT WORTH (CBSNewsTexas.com) - Three organizations in Tarrant County were awarded more than $2 million in grants to help reduce the DNA and rape kit backlog.
While DNA evidence is collected with most every report of a rape, the number of kits continues to overwhelm police departments across the country, including those in Texas.
The Fort Worth Police Department, Tarrant County and the University of North Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth received the grants as part of the U.S. Department of Justice's Capacity Enhancement for Backlog Reduction Program.
The program was authorized by the Debbie Smith Act, which U.S. Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) helped introduce. It was signed into law in 2004 to provide local and state crime laboratories with resources to end the backlog of untested DNA evidence from unsolved crimes, analyze DNA samples and increase the capacity to process DNA in order to guard against future backlogs.
Since it became law, more than 860,000 DNA cases have been processed nationwide. In addition to crime scene evidence, Debbie Smith funds are also used to process offender DNA samples to ensure evidence from unsolved crimes can be matched against a database of known offenders, similar to the criminal fingerprint databases.
Here's a breakdown of the distribution of funds:
- Fort Worth PD, $708,323.
- University of North Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth, $787,330.
- Tarrant County $600,000.
In 2012, CBS News Texas spoke to Lavinia Masters of Dallas who was raped at the age of 13. She said that her rape kit sat on a shelf for more than two decades.
"I lived a terrible life of fear as a child, because my rapist told me that if he saw the police come to our home that he would come back and kill me and my family, because he knew my family," said Masters.
Though Masters' kit was eventually tested the case did not end on a good note. The DNA profile of her attacker was eventually linked to a serial rapist, but not before the man had committed multiple sexual assaults and the statute of limitations on her case had run out.
Sen. Cornyn previously used Masters' case as an example showing the importance of rape kit testing, as a matter of public safety.
