The US Congress is on the verge of approving an additional $41m in grants to process tens of thousands of unprocessed sexual assault DNA kits, adding to the $1.2bn the federal government has spent over 10 years trying to reduce a nationwide backlog.

The Senate is scheduled to vote on Tuesday on a bill that passed the House last month.

“It is a travesty when communities are terrorized and innocent people are victimized simply because evidence that could be used to prevent these crimes sits untested on a shelf somewhere," said Steve Cohen, a Democrat representing Tennessee, in a statement before the House approved the appropriations on May 30. An amendment named for the representative added $5m in funding to the $36m line item.



Some rape kits sit for years in police storage lockers in local jurisdictions. The bags, boxes and envelopes containing DNA evidence gleaned from victims of sexual assaults are the result an intrusive exam that can take hours in a hospital emergency room.

A 12,000-kit backlog was recently discovered in Memphis. Detroit reportedly has an 11,000-kit backlog. Cleveland, Dallas, and Las Vegas reportedly have 4,000-kit backlogs.

"There's a significant problem nationally," said Scott Berkowitz, president of the Rape and Incest National Network, reportedly the nation's largest anti-sexual assault organization. "There's been a lot of progress and it's led to testing many thousands of kits, and taking loads of rapists off the streets, but there's a continuing problem."

There is no official nationwide accounting of unprocessed kits. Any local law enforcement agency can collect DNA samples from sexual assault victims, and it's unclear how local jurisdictions in many areas tally the untested DNA kits.



Reducing the backlog has bipartisan and presidential support. Obama's 2015 budget requested $35m to help reduce the backlog, and the House approved a $41m appropriation May 30.

The new money adds to existing grants. For more than 10 years, the Department of Justice has distributed hundreds of millions of dollars to local and state agencies, trying to solve the problem.

Congress first tackled the backlog in 2004 when the Debbie Smith DNA Backlog Grant Program took effect. More than $1.2bn has since been spent on the program, most of which goes to state and local agencies.

Although the grants provided cash to defray laboratory costs, localities had the option of spending the money other ways. Professional forensics organizations could use the money to train crime lab auditors, to increase lab capacity or to reduce forensic backlogs other than sexual assault DNA kits.

More than one-third of the $691m spent between 2008 and 2012 was spent on "initiatives not directly benefiting state and local DNA backlog efforts," or administrative costs, according to a Government Accountability Office report that called on the Department of Justice to better monitor grantees. Last year, Congress required 75% of the cash go toward DNA testing or expanding labs' capacity to test.

Even infamous backlogs that caused public outcry are still unprocessed, such as the one in Detroit. Almost five years after the discovery of 11,000 unprocessed kits, only 2,000 have been tested, according to USA Today.



In 2011, the National Institute of Justice studied Detroit's log-jammed forensics laboratory to find out why the city had such a staggering backlog. Reports found the forensics labs in a poor state.

Researchers found there were no established procedures for processing the kits. Leadership turnover, budget cuts to the lab and staff, old equipment, poor quality exams, lack of advocacy services and professional training all contributed to the problem, the NIJ found.

As part of the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act, Congress also allowed the Department of Justice to award money for local agencies to audit backlogs.

"The biggest gap right now is lack of solid data of how many cases have yet to be tested," said Berkowitz. "That's a really crucial piece of this, because it's going to tell us finally how close we are to fully solving the problem."

If Congress funds the president's budget request, the news grants would also establish best practices for comprehensive rape kit reform, create a system for victim notification and create teams to investigate and prosecute the cases that emerge from testing, according to Melissa Schwartz, spokesperson for the anti-sexual assault Joyful Heart Foundation.

The grants are part of a $51.2bn Senate appropriations bill funding the Justice Department, commerce, science and other agencies.