I grew up in a suburb of Detroit, in Wayne County. What I recall is that there was practically an ongoing blood feud between Detroit, the county, and the state. Racism may not have been the only factor, but it was a decisive factor. I couldn't make sense of it at the time, being just a kid, but I think it might still be hard to make sense of today.

I certainly don't want to make any excuses for what happened, but one question that crosses my mind is: Did Detroit have any money to investigate these crimes, even if they had wanted to?

Demographically, Detroit is currently over 80% black, perhaps only coincidentally similar to the proportion of untested rape kits. Perhaps.

However, Detroit was ~30% white in 1980, 3x what it is today, and untested rape kits surely fed a perception of intractable crime over the intervening years as white flight killed the city.

Wayne County != Detroit, Detroit might be 80% black, but Wayne County according to what I've read is 40.5% black.

The difference is very stark.

Check it out at the Dot Project (turn on the overlay in the lower left).

https://demographics.virginia.edu/DotMap/index.html

That line between green and blue between Warren and Detroit is 8 Mile Road, and yes the split between the south and north sides really is that stark.

Wayne County extends west to Livonia and Plymouth, which is a white, affluent, low-crime area. And south through a lot of other white suburbs.

It's completely believable to me that a random, non-discriminatory processing of rape kits would result in 86% of untested kits coming from people of color on that map.

Looking where I live on that map is disturbing. There are two jails near me and they are practically 100% green. :(

> It's completely believable to me that a random, non-discriminatory processing of rape kits would result in 86% of untested kits coming from people of color on that map.

While you're couching this as hypothetical - this is in direct contradiction to what the prosecutor said as well as her experiences.

but north of 8 mile is not Wayne County.

You have to look west and south of detroit to see wayne county that isn't detroit

True, but in this case the rape kits came from a Detroit PD warehouse.

> you should learn a little history

Be polite.

My "line of reasoning" is a simple statement of fact since there's quibbling about demographic percentages. I made no claims about where or who, any claims about rape. Maybe you should learn not to make assumptions.

Likely because it's not civil, in particular "you should learn a little history".

Unnecessary condescending tone regardless of information delivery attempted if I had to hazard a guess.

> The problem with your line of reasoning is the rapes don't occur across the county at a proportional rate. The vast majority of those rape kits come from Detroit

@AdjustYourWrld: Educate us! Citations please! We are all here to learn and indulge our curiosity.

That has not been my general experience. It has however been my experience that the forum expects a degree of civility from its participants. This remark is, in addition to being generally false, also condescending and fails to advance the discussion. Facts are welcome, insults are not.

This is a problem that crosses socio-ethnic boundaries as well, unfortunately. Not that I mean to minimize the historic and ongoing mistreatment of minority crime victims...

Austin Texas -a predominantly white and affluent city- has a terrible history of mistreatment of rape kits, 850 in this case:

http://www.statesman.com/news/local/city-memo-mold-found-con...

Austin has plenty of poor people, and the white population is somewhat under 50 percent - 47 according to recent estimates. Hispanic population is about 36%. Keep in mind Austin is the core downtown city, and if you’re thinking of affluence and whiteness, you might be thinking of the suburbs.

It’s possible that economically disadvantaged nonwhite people maybe disproportionately represented among rape victims, also there exists a possibility that there is economic or racial bias in the processing of rape kits.

The wealthiest part of Austin, Westlake, barely 5 minutes from downtown, isn't even officially part of Austin.

Thanks, your comment illustrates my intent. I erred in saying downtown. What i meant to say is that Austin the city isn’t necessarily what people think of as ‘Austin’. When I think of South Austin and the area east of I35, especially as it was 8-10 years ago, I picture a working class area with low income hispanic people and my young college friends, not anyone affluent.

Austin is a mostly suburban city. Just look at the map.

That's kind of how texas works though

Thanks, I’m aware of how the city works since i lived in Austin for a couple of years. I feel like the demographic information that’s available out there can give more information then looking at the map. If you’re talking about APD, it’s fairly urban.

Austin is more than the "core downtown city." And I am not talking about Round Rock or Cedar Park or Buda which are majority white.

The downtown/near-downtown is one of the priciest places in the state of Texas as far as real-estate costs and the attendant costs of a matching lifestyle. It's only out in the middle ring of the suburbs of Far North/East/South Austin that it starts getting affordable. That is, until you get back into the affluence again in the northern bedroom communities of Round Rock, Cedar Park and Georgetown.

> also there exists a possibility that there is economic or racial bias in the processing of rape kits.

There were 11,000 untested rape kits over 2 decades. This hardly sounds like a mistake related to some bias. There is obviously a much bigger issue here, it wasn't individual cases being ignored based on some parameters.

Then that bigger issue applies to Memphis and Los Angeles, too, both of which had a larger backlog than Detroit. Safer to say that bias and resources are primary causes, since the subtext of what you're saying is that something is "going on" in Detroit.

http://www.endthebacklog.org/backlog/where-backlog-exists-an...

I don't see how you figure. State and local governments can and do fail to provide services to neighborhoods or towns, and often the places they fail to serve tend to be poor and majority-minority. Or they could just systemically fail to pursue rapists if the victim fit certain criteria and easily achieve these numbers (the latter is what's suggested in the interview):

> Q: All the things you were talking about, the better tracking system, the new guidelines for when rape kits get tested ... in the National Institute of Justice report on the backlog (by Michigan State University Professor Rebecca Campbell), the big takeaway there was that too often, officers didn't believe victims, and had used disbelief as a way to triage their workload.

> A: They just closed cases, even cases where I think they believed the victim ... They closed cases because the women had worked as prostitutes or had mental illness issues or had substance abuse. Didn't believe them, didn't care, and this was one issue that led to the backlog of these kits.

> Q: That's something we look for in certain victims — when the victim is a teenage boy of color, or a woman who has been raped, we want them to be perfect. They can't have had a drink or have worked as a prostitute, and if they have, there's a mindset that makes them almost ineligible to be a victim.

> A: One of the reasons we have these untested rape kits ... and I can use Detroit as an example, 86% of our victims in these untested kits are people of color. You're not going to find too many blond-haired, blue eyed white women ... Because their kits are treated differently, their cases are solved. That's just the way it is in this country. If you're a person of color, if you're a different economic class, then your case across the board, across the board, not just sexual assault — they're treated differently. And that's just the truth. People may not want to admit it, but I've seen it throughout my career and I know it's true ... It's just true. ... Race is at the center of this in many ways as well, unfortunately, we know that across the criminal justice system. ...

> The training aspect is a huge aspect that can turn around this issue. If we cannot treat our sexual assault victims right, especially if justice has been denied to them for so many years, we certainly want to be able to treat our current survivors properly. As you well know, culture change is the hardest kind of change to make.