According to End the Backlog, a project sponsored by the Joyful Heart Foundation, which seeks to assist crime victims, hundreds of thousands of rape kits collected from victims are sitting untested in evidence storage or crime labs nationwide. As advances in DNA testing placed strain on crime labs, there are no national standards for keeping and testing the evidence.

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Efforts by individual jurisdictions to eliminate the backlogs have shown benefits: When New York City committed to eliminating a backlog of 17,000 rape kits in 1999, the process yielded 200 arrests.

As California attorney general, the job she held before being elected to the Senate in 2016, Harris sought to help local police agencies to clear backlogs by introducing new testing technology. Her office’s Rapid DNA Service team said it cleared all 1,300 untested rape kits in the state’s backlog in one year and earned national recognition and grants for its efforts.

Her new federal plan, funding for which would have to be approved by Congress, would require states that opt into her proposal to count and report their untested rape kits each year, test their cases in a timely fashion, keep victims informed and increase access to rape kits in underserved areas.

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Harris would also encourage states to require law enforcement agencies to keep rape kits in evidence files until the alleged crimes could no longer be prosecuted under statutes of limitations.

The campaign did not say how Harris might fund her plan to eliminate the backlog.

The rape kit plan is another effort by Harris to harness her history as a prosecutor in a positive fashion. Since joining the race in January, she has been criticized occasionally for actions she took as San Francisco district attorney and as attorney general.