Baltimore Police will receive $1.2 million from the Governor’s Office of Crime Prevention and Policy to continue its sexual assault kit testing program that, after years of dysfunction, is now portrayed as a notable success.

In 2016, sexual assault survivors who thought their kits were being processed and moving through the city’s criminal justice system got a rude awakening.

The U.S. Department of Justice found that the BPD crime lab tested rape kits in just 15% of sexual assault cases. At the time, Maryland law did not require law enforcement agencies to test rape kits. That left it up to BPD detectives to make a request to have a kit tested by the crime lab.

A subsequent report found that police departments across Maryland routinely destroyed rape kits.

The 2017 consent decree between DOJ and the city of Baltimore did much to streamline and standardize the testing process, along with a 1999 state law creating uniform testing criteria and allotting money to local jurisdictions for test kits and lab supplies.

Aided by these grants, the BPD crime lab has no backlog of “real-time cases,” Lt. Colonel Steve Hohman, deputy chief of detectives, told the City Council last fall.

Significant Improvements

“Unless there is an outlier, we have a 100% test policy. So we test all of the kits that we get,” Hohman said.

While conceding there is still a backlog of historic cases, “for real-time cases, that queue is moving in a way that is not creating any kind of delay in getting those tested. Our crime lab is really, really good at that.”

He said case management of sexual assault crimes is well integrated with both the office of State’s Attorney Ivan Bates and Mercy Medical Center, which serves as the citywide hub for sexual assault treatment.

At present, around 30 forensic nurse examiners at Mercy care for the survivors of sexual assault (age 13 and over) as well as victims of domestic violence and those suffering from elder neglect and abuse.

“We test all of the kits that we get”  – Lt. Col. Steve Hohman.

Mercy administers the Sexual Assault Forensic Exam (SAFE) that can be tracked online as it moves from the hospital to the crime lab to law enforcement. State law requires that historic kits must be entered into the tracking system by the end of 2025.

The state grant will primarily pay partial salaries and benefits for 10 forensic scientists and two supervisors at the BPD crime lab.

Another $300,000 will go for laboratory tools and the kit storage system, and $100,000 for “Lean Six Sigma process improvement consultation” and training.

“The key to success in providing closure to the victims of sexual assault is the timely production of testing results,” says the state grant, which is set for approval by the Board of Estimates tomorrow.