Detroit Sexual Assault Kit (SAK) Action Research Project (ARP), Final Report

• NCJ Number: 248680
• Date Published: February 2015
• Length: 551 pages
• Agencies: NIJ-Sponsored

Annotation

This final report on the Detroit Sexual Assault Kit (SAK) Action Research Project (ARP) addresses the following project goals: to assess the scope of the problem by conducting a complete census of all SAKs in the police property inventory; to identify the underlying factors contributing to so many unsubmitted SAKs; to develop a plan for testing SAKs and to evaluate the efficacy of that plan; and to create a victim notification protocol and evaluate the effectiveness/efficiency of that protocol.

Abstract

This report documents the Detroit Sexual Assault Action-Research Project, in which a multidisciplinary team looked at the issue of a large number of sexual assault kits (SAKs) that had not been sent to a crime lab for DNA-testing. The team identified the underlying factors that contributed to the issue; developed and evaluated a plan for testing the SAKs; and created and evaluated protocols for notifying victims of the results of the testing. The report also offers practitioner-friendly resources, including how to create victim-notification protocols.