did you miss the part where beto o’rourke, in the middle of hurricane harvey, called up a woman he’d met at a shelter to asked if she and her family needed anything, and she said, “well i’m fine but my sister-in-law has six kids and a tree fell on their house and destroyed the roof and thankfully no one was hurt but now they’re staying with a family friend and they’re rapidly running out of supplies which is such a shame because it’s her birthday” and beto o’rourke proceeded to drive to the sister-in-law’s house with a truckload of supplies and a birthday cake & he and his campaign staff sang happy birthday to her. that’s like the david sheldrick wildlife trust elephant adoption of public service.
A new online portal was fully implemented this week to allow survivors, as well as lawyers, medical staff and law enforcement, to track where a kit is in the testing process.
“The primary purpose behind this system is to help survivors get some answers,” Chief John R. Batiste said in a statement. “That was the difficult part for a lot of the survivors, is that they had no idea where their kits were.”
In October, the Attorney General’s office conducted a statewide inventory of sexual assault kits and found that 6,460 kits had not been submitted to crime labs for testing. The oldest unsubmitted kit was collected in 1982.
In addition to unsubmitted kits, there is a backlog of hundreds of kits that have been submitted. The Washington State Patrol (WSP) told the Attorney General’s office in October that 3,300 backlogged kits had been submitted, and 1,700 of those kits had been tested.
The new system that allows survivors to track their kits will not impact the lab’s ability to reduce what has become known as the rape kit “backlog,” Larry Hebert, director of WSP’s forensic laboratory services bureau, said in an email.
I'm Still Kicking 