Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2015
Floor Speech
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Mr. Speaker, this is the final amendment of this bill. This amendment will not kill the bill nor will it merely send it back to committee, but rather, if adopted, the bill will immediately proceed to final passage as amended.
Mr. Speaker, this motion to recommit is straightforward and simple. It would increase funding for three critical priorities: first, our chronically underfunded Violence Against Women Act programs; second, for grants to process the backlog on rape kits; and, third, for our Community Oriented Policing Services, COPS, grants program, which was slashed deeply in the appropriations bill before us tonight.
Now, given the limited time that I have and the late hour that I have to discuss all these issues, I just want to focus my remarks on one of the Nation's staggering backlogs that we haven't talked about. We have talked, and importantly, about the backlog at the Veterans Administration, but we have been silent about the backlog of the sexual assault kits that have not been analyzed. We have not seen a similar amount of attention paid to the crisis in these rape kits that have been backlogged.
We have all heard these harrowing tales from our communities from young women and men who have waited so long for justice--and waited, and waited, and waited, and waited some more. These victims have not only endured the initial assault, but they have also endured an invasive exam to collect DNA shortly after the attack.
Mr. Speaker, these exams last for over 4 hours in some cases. It is unimaginable how difficult this is to bear. It takes so much courage for a victim to come forward and endure in hopes that the perpetrator will be caught. You know, it is the very least we owe to these victims to process all of the evidence, yet thousands of victims across the country never hear anything ever again.
Police already possess the evidence that is needed to identify and convict the perpetrators of these crimes, yet criminals remain at large primarily because these unprocessed kits remain in back rooms, warehouses, and labs. And given the sad reality that most sex offenders are recidivists, it is imperative that we close the loop on these old cases so offenders don't seek out new victims.
Part of the terror of being raped is knowing that the perpetrator is still out there, he can come back to get you, someone else, you don't know who he is, and it puts not only that individual in terror, but puts the whole community in terror.
On the aggregate level, the Department of Justice has tallied about 400,000 rape kits that remain sitting in evidence lockers, largely because local authorities can't afford the $500 to $1,500 it costs to test these kits. Some of these kits go back to the 1980s. And even though this evidence is old, Mr. Speaker, we shouldn't assume that they are meaningless.
In Detroit, law enforcement personnel, as an example, are currently analyzing 11,000 abandoned kits they found in a warehouse. Six years, these kits have been sitting there for 6 years. After processing only 10 percent of these rape kits, they have identified 46 serial rapists that they have identified.
In New York City, they showed that after they processed their backlog of 17,000 kits, the arrest rate for rape kits increased from 40 percent to 70 percent.
The overwhelmingly scourge of backlogged kits require nothing less than a national commitment, Mr. Speaker, including a dedicated response from the United States Congress.
I am pleased that the bill before us tonight fulfills the request from the Obama administration to provide funding for a new grant program to inventory and test rape kits, develop units to pursue new investigative leads, and offer support to victims during the process.
The new investment through this bipartisan bill is an important first step.
However, through simple addition, we can tally the pending cost of clearing the backlog.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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