More than 5,000 kits containing hair and fluids from sexual assault victims are languishing in police evidence rooms across Oregon - untested by the state crime lab and holding untold clues that could tie suspects to unsolved rapes or prevent future ones.

Agency Untested kits Portland Police Bureau 2,408 Washington County Sheriff's Office 333 Gresham Police Department 288 Salem Police Department 234 Medford Police Department 134 Beaverton Police Department 131 Bend Police Department 113 Oregon State Police 101 Springfield Police Department 91 Clackamas County Sheriff's Office 80 Roseburg Police Department 72 Klamath Falls Police Department 61 Hillsboro Police Department 60 Lane County Sheriff's Office 60 Albany Police Department 54 Corvallis Police Department 52 Milwaukie Police Department 51 Woodburn Police Department 44 Grants Pass Police Department 42 Keizer Police Department 42 Deschutes County Sheriff's Office 42 Jackson County Sheriff's Office 41 Tigard Police Department 37 Tualatin Police Department 37 Yamhill County Sheriff's Office 37 Newport Police Department 33 La Grande Police Department 32 Newberg Police Department 29 Forest Grove Police Department 26 Lebanon Police Department 24 Redmond Police Department 24 St. Helens Police Department 21 Baker City Police Department 20 Ontario Police Department 20 Central Point Police Department 19 Coos Bay Police Department 16 The Dalles Police Department 16 Astoria Police Department 15 Gladstone Police Department 15 Hood River Police Department 14 Pendleton Police Department 14 Prineville Police Department 14 Ashland Police Department 13 McMinnville Police Department 13 Cottage Grove Police Department 11 Columbia County Sheriff's Office 11 Crook County Sheriff's Office 11 Lincoln County Sheriff's Office 11 Lake Oswego Police Department 10 Monmouth Police Department 10 Sherwood Police Department 10 Benton County Sheriff's Office 9 Coos County Sheriff's Office 9 Clatsop County Sheriff's Office 8 Canby Police Department 7 Scappoose Police Department 7 Multnomah County Sheriff's Office 7 North Bend Police Department 6 Stayton Police Department 6 Jefferson County Sheriff's Office 6 Lincoln City Police Department 4 Madras Police Department 4 Sutherlin Police Department 4 Sweet Home Police Department 3 University of Oregon Campus Police 3 Curry County Sheriff's Office 3 Hermiston Police Department 2 Independence Police Department 2 Port of Portland Police 2 Umatilla Police Department 2 West Linn Police Department 2 Klamath County Sheriff's Office 2 Polk County Sheriff's Office 2 Boardman Police Department 1 Coburg Police Department 1 Fairview Police Department 1 King City Police Department 1 Rainier Police Department 1 Rockaway Beach Police Department 1 Tillamook Police Department 1 Morrow County Sheriff's Office 1 Umatilla County Sheriff's Office 1 Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fisheries 1

Amid a growing national movement to test all kits and legislative pressure to require an audit, Oregon State Police for the first time did a count, asking each law enforcement agency in the state to provide the number of their unprocessed kits.

The total so far shows 4,510 untested kits from named victims and another 697 from victims who asked to remain anonymous. They date back at least 30 years.

Portland has almost half of the 5,207 total untested kits: 2,408 since 1985, including 328 from people who wanted to remain anonymous.

Oregon's numbers don't approach the load discovered in some states, such as Ohio's more than 10,000 untested kits or Tennessee's approximately 9,000 untested kits.

The total for the whole state of Oregon is less than half the number held in a single city -- Detroit had 11,000 untested kits in 2009. New York had 17,000 old kits when it began a three-year push to get them all tested in 2000.

On a per capita basis, Oregon's number of untested kits appears to fall near the middle of the pack.

Establishing the scope of the problem is just the first step. Law enforcement leaders now need to determine how to prioritize kits for testing and who will do the testing. Then come the questions of who will do the follow-up investigations and how to notify victims if the analysis matches DNA to a suspect.

A work group of police, prosecutors and victim advocates will meet over the next several months to draft uniform guidelines that agencies can follow so the kits will no longer gather dust on evidence shelves. They acknowledge that not quickly testing kit evidence could hamper arresting and prosecuting offenders.

"The goal of that work group is to come up with some good guidelines so a victim, no matter where they go to a report a sex assault, will receive a similar response,'' Salem Deputy Police Chief Steve Bellshaw said.

Other cities and states have found that testing years-old kits has helped identify unknown offenders, connect evidence from a crime scene to serial rapists, solve sex assaults in other states, confirm the presence of a known suspect or exonerate innocent suspects.

"If we have a practice that's not the best model, we need to change that,'' said State Police Superintendent Richard Evans Jr. "It's all about making sure we solve as many crimes as we can.''

A sexual assault kit can include blood, urine, hair, semen and other body secretion samples obtained from a detailed forensic examination. After the exam, the evidence is stored in the kit, essentially a manila envelope. The evidence is intended to be analyzed at a crime lab and preserved to help identify a suspect and aid in criminal prosecution.

"The real work will be prioritizing and following up on each case,'' Evans said. "We're trying to come up with some best practices for future submission, so each agency has a resource manual and so we don't have this issue in the future.''

The Legislature this week approved money for two additional forensic scientists for the state lab to help address the stockpile. But Evans said he's also open to using properly accredited private labs.

Michele Roland-Schwartz, executive director of the Oregon Attorney General's Sexual Assault Task Force, said she's committed to working closely with law enforcement agencies, prosecutors and victim advocate groups to ensure a long-term commitment to addressing the problem.

"If kits are not processed, we are potentially missing information about perpetrators,'' Roland-Schwartz said. "I don't anticipate this is going to be an overnight fix.''

How did Oregon get here?

Police across the state agree that the main reason for the glut of untested kits is the lack of protocol to guide investigators.

Most sexual assault detectives have had great latitude in deciding when to submit the kits for testing. In some agencies, officers don't submit the kits for processing if a suspect has already been identified and confessed to a crime, or if a prosecutor doesn't think the kit is needed to proceed with a case.

Police also have said they didn't want to flood an overworked state crime lab with requests for kit tests. The lab currently is waiting to process more than 1,150 DNA samples from both violent crimes and property crimes, according to Thomas Barnes, director of the state crime lab.

In 2009, the National Institute of Justice did a nationwide survey on why kits might not be submitted. It revealed many of the same factors: no suspect identified, analysis not requested by a prosecutor or a lab struggling with a backlog.

Salem's Deputy Chief Bellshaw said in the past kits were untested because detectives might ask: Is this case prosecutable? Do we believe the victim?

"Sometimes," he said, "we let our personal opinions get in the way."

Department Untested kits per 1,000 residents Portland 4.05 Roseburg 3.31 Newport 3.30 Klamath Falls 2.90 Gresham 2.69 Milwaukie 2.50 La Grande 2.44 Baker City 2.05 Hood River 1.94 Ontario 1.78

"What we're learning now is that a lot of these offenders offend over and over again and move through these communities,'' he said. "I probably in 1993 should have sent those kits in to be tested (even if a suspect confessed) because my kit could have solved an unknown kit in another jurisdiction.''

Portland and Salem have developed their first written policies on how to handle kit testing in the past year. Medford is in the process of doing so.

"This was done in an attempt to eliminate any victim bias that may have been present,'' Portland Police Chief Larry O'Dea wrote in the bureau's application for a federal grant to help test the kits.

Salem police began early last year forwarding all sex assault kits to the state crime lab for testing unless a victim didn't want to proceed. "We saw what was going on in Detroit and all the other cities,'' Bellshaw said.

Since last year, police in Medford have typically sent all the kits they've received to the state lab - even when victims have chosen to remain anonymous, said Lt. Michael Budreau.

What's next

A work group of police, prosecutors, and victim advocates are hoping to meet in the coming months to devise a model policy for how to get the kits tested and how to notify victims of DNA matches.

The jargon

The question of how rape kits are handled by law enforcement agencies and forensic labs has become a political issue nationwide. As debate has grown, so has confusion over the process and terms used to describe it, especially with "backlog" versus "untested" kits. Here's a primer:

Untested kits

: Most police agencies in Oregon don't test all the kits they receive. Agencies use a variety of methods to decide whether or not to test kits. Kits that are not sent to the lab and are instead stored in police evidence rooms are not backlogged; they are "untested kits."

Backlogs

: That term refers to the waitlist of sorts as Oregon State Police forensic lab analysts process kits sent by police. For personal crimes, including sexual assaults, the lab currently takes about five months to test and return kits. The lab can speed up the process for high priority cases, such as if police think they may be dealing with a serial rapist or if a case is nearing trial.

Multnomah, Marion and Lane Counties -- among the state's most populated counties -- are seeking up to $ 2 million from the Manhattan District Attorney's office to help process their nearly 3,000 untested kits, their grant application said.

If they get the money, Multnomah County plans to contract with a private lab that would be used by all three counties, estimating the processing cost for each kit at $695. They'd submit the first batch of kits for testing between September and December.

Salem police now send a batch of 10 kits to the state lab, wait for results and then send 10 more, often before a detective gets a chance to delve into an investigation, Salem Sgt. Mike Bennett.

They recently tied a man involved in a 2010 child sex abuse case in Salem, whose DNA was required upon his conviction, to an unsolved 1998 sex assault, through evidence from a kit tested soon after the 1998 offense, Sgt. Mike Bennett said.

"It just shows the obvious significant importance of sending those kits to the lab,'' Bennett said.

The three counties plan to follow New York's so-called "fork-lift approach'' in testing everything except the anonymous kits.

How are sexual assault kits processed?

1.

The hospital

: If victims go to the hospital, they can choose whether to have evidence collected. The evidence is stored in kits, which are purchased by the state and distributed by hospitals. Nurses collect hairs, saliva, semen and any other potential biological evidence in the kits.

2.

The police

: Law enforcement agencies collect the kits from hospitals and - in most jurisdictions statewide - decide on a case-by-case basis whether kits might be useful for prosecution. If a victim wants to remain anonymous, their kits generally are not sent to the lab.

3.

The lab

: If law enforcement agencies decide to test the kits, they are sent to the Oregon State Police Forensic Laboratory. There the kits are tested to identify what substances are and whether a DNA profile exists. If a profile is found, the evidence is entered into the federal DNA database (CODIS, the Combined DNA Index System) in hopes of identifying who it belongs to.

4.

Back to police

: Once the kits are tested, results are returned to law enforcement agencies.

However, they'd move cases to the top of the list if the statute of limitations, now extended to 12 years for adult victims of first-degree sexual assaults, is within two years.

Best practices call for submitting the kits to a lab within 10 days and testing the evidence within 30 days of an alleged assault. But to do so, the state lab would need more resources, Evans said.

Private labs, with oversight by state forensic workers, can do the biological screening and DNA tests. For every case that's outsourced, state police would need five hours to do a peer review, ensure compliance and enter the results into the national DNA database, said Barnes, the state crime lab director.

Phyllis Barkhurst, co-founder of the University of Oregon's Center for the Prevention of Abuse and Neglect who previously led the state's sexual assault task force, said she's not surprised to learn thousands of kits have gone untested in Portland and elsewhere in the state.

"Every seven or eight years, there's great attention to the problem and a flurry of activity, but then that falls off,'' she said.

All kits shouldn't be treated the same, she said. They shouldn't be handled simply by what date they come in, "but by what good it would do'' to process the evidence, she said.

Police also should send all kits involving an unknown suspect to a lab or if there's more than one suspect, Barkhurst said. "Those kits need to be processed quickly because they have implications for public safety,'' she said.

Police agencies in Oregon have agreed not to process the so-called Jane Doe kits unless a victim wants to proceed. They want to respect the wishes of those who may not be ready to pursue a prosecution.

Roland-Schwartz, of the state's sexual assault task force, said the kits are only one part of a sexual assault investigation. With the renewed focus on testing old kits, the task force hopes a victim's immediate health care and support needs aren't ignored.

'The kit is a tool, but that encounter is much more than a bag of swabs,'' she said. "This is a critical access point for health care for victims of sex assault. I'm hopeful this provides a real opportunity to elevate the issue of sexual assault and impacts how we respond to victims moving forward.''

--Maxine Bernstein, Carli Brousseau and Laura Gunderson

mbernstein@oregonian.com

503-221-8212; @maxoregonian

503-221-8378; @lgunderson

cbrosseau@oregonian.com

503-294-5121; @carlibrosseau