For years, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation has worked to resolve a backlog in untested rape kits that have left a stone unturned in thousands of sexual assault cases.
State officials are now acknowledging another equally serious failure of investigations into sexual assault and other violent crimes.
Local law enforcement and booking agencies across Tennessee have failed to collect potentially tens of thousands of DNA samples from alleged perpetrators that are required by law. Rape kits and other DNA crime scene evidence is only as effective as the potential to find a match to perpetrators whose genetic information has been uploaded into a federal database.
“We have a number of cases that are unsolved because we don’t have a hit in the system,” TBI Director David Rausch told Gov. Bill Lee during a November presentation about the agency’s budget.
“If that DNA isn’t being collected, then there’s a lot of people out there that are in the shadows,” he said. “We don’t know the size of that problem in Tennessee.”