The Missouri Attorney General’s Office (AGO) awarded RKV a contract to develop a statewide evidence tracking system for sexual assault forensic evidence (SAFE) kits. The system will be used to track SAFE kits from the time they are manufactured through final disposition. SAFE kits are passed through multiple organizations including criminal justice agencies, health care providers, and forensic crime labs. Nationwide there have been issues with tracking the location and disposition of SAFE Kits. The evidence tracking system RKV will work with the AGO to build will provide a robust solution which will:
- Allow organizations handling SAFE kits to have a complete and up-to-date inventory of all SAFE kits in their possession or scope of responsibility, both before and after evidence collection.
- Allow organization administrators and statewide policymakers to have a better understanding of SAFE kit collection, processing, and testing dynamics through robust reporting functionality,
- Maintain complete security and confidentiality of all victim or case related records contained in the ETS.
- Allow victims of sexual assault or their designees to view and track the status and location of their SAFE kit at any given time.
The Sexual Assault Kit Initiative (SAKI) is a nationwide undertaking funded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) at the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) that began in 2015. This initiative helps state and local jurisdictions across the country inventory and test sexual assault forensic evidence (SAFE) kits, upload eligible offender DNA profiles into a national database, investigate and prosecute cases in which offender DNA profiles match, or hit, against existing records in the database, and develop procedural and evidence tracking capacity to prevent future backlogs.
In 2018, BJA awarded the Missouri Attorney General’s Office (AGO) a three-year SAKI grant. The AGO is obligated under section 595.220, RSMo., as well as through the BJA grant, to develop a statewide evidence tracking system for sexual assault forensic evidence (SAFE) kits.
