Most sexual assaults are never prosecuted, as less than 10% of cases reported to the police end in a conviction or guilty plea (see Lonsway & Archambault, 2012; Shaw & Lee, 2019 for reviews). The most precipitous drop-off in case progression occurs quite early in the process, as law enforcement personnel clear most cases without a referral to prosecutors for consideration of charges (Bouffard, 2000; Campbell, 2008; Pattavina et al., 2016; Spohn et al., 2014). Kerstetter (1990) argued that these actions by the police “form the gateway to the criminal justice system” (p. 268) and provide a “way to define and control access at the gateway to justice” (p. 313). Over the past three decades, a large of body of literature has substantiated Kerstetter’s (1990) claim that the police are the primary guardians of that gateway (Epstein & Goodman, 2019; Frazier & Haney, 1996; Jordan, 2004; O’Neal & Spohn, 2017; Page, 2008; Spohn et al., 2001; Spohn & Tellis, 2012; Tasca et al., 2012). Police define and control access through many means: by treating victims so harshly they disengage and “refuse to prosecute” (Kaiser et al., 2017; Kelley & Campbell, 2013; Murphy et al., 2014), by maligning victims in their written reports so their accounts are discredited (Shaw et al., 2017; Tasca et al., 2012), and by conducting investigations of such poor quality that prosecutors would be unable to charge a case given the available evidence (Shaw et al., 2016; Venema, 2016). In recent years, it has become clear that there often is more available evidence, but police have been purposely storing and ignoring forensic evidence associated with thousands of reported sexual assaults (Campbell et al., 2017; Pinchevsky, 2018). The discovery of large stockpiles of untested rape kits (also known as sexual assault kits [SAKs]) in police evidence storage facilities throughout the United States has raised new questions about how police are controlling access to the criminal justice system. Throughout the United States, hundreds of thousands of sexual assault kits (SAKs which are also termed “rape kits”) have never been submitted by law enforcement personnel to a crime laboratory for forensic DNA testing. Prior research indicates that negative stereotypes about victims’ influence police decisions to submit kits for testing, but forensic crime laboratory personnel may also be involved in SAK submission decisions.

The purpose of the current study was to explore the communication and collaboration between police and crime lab personnel regarding SAK submissions within a community with large numbers of unsubmitted rape kits. Drawing from three years of ethnographic observations and longitudinal qualitative interviews, we found that the police department’s crime lab did not have sufficient resources to test all rape kits in police custody, which is a problem that forensic laboratories are facing across the United States.

However, we also found that access to this limited resource was controlled by crime lab personnel and their rape myth beliefs about which victims and which cases were considered worthy of the time, effort, and attention of the criminal justice system. Lab personnel emphasized that police should only submit “real” cases for forensic DNA testing, which they typically defined as physically violent stranger perpetrated sexual assaults; “shady” cases did not merit testing, which they defined as known-offender assaults, reports made by adolescent victims, and cases in which the victim may have been engaged in sex work. We noted marked similarities in police and lab personnel’s rape myth acceptance, and stakeholders readily agreed that they did have a common understanding about which victims were not credible and therefore which SAKs did not merit testing. We discuss these findings in light of recommendations from the National Academy of Sciences for the independence and autonomy of the forensic sciences.