Did America address its rape kit backlog? Here's how USA TODAY measured what happened.

In 2015, USA TODAY Network reporters discovered tens of thousands of untested rape kits stored at police departments across the nation. Later that year, the U.S. Department of Justice announced millions in grants to test backlogged kits, bring resolution to victims and put their attackers in prison.

For more than a year, a new USA TODAY investigation has examined whether the 90 local and state agencies that have since received funding are achieving those goals. Here’s how we handled the numbers.

First, reporters gathered data kept by the Bureau of Justice Assistance , the arm of the U.S. Department of Justice that runs the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative grant program. BJA awards funding, provides technical support and collects information about the outcomes from grantees. Reporters found errors, misleading figures and blank fields in that data, so they reached out to grant recipients to ask for key numbers, such as: How many kits were sent for testing? How many victims were contacted with information about their cases? How many cases resulted in a conviction?

Some grantees still didn’t supply data, or their figures did not appear to add up. Some state-level grantees had not tracked what local police and prosecutors did with DNA matches. Some places relied on a mix of funding sources. For instance, they counted backlogged kits with local money but used the federal grant to support investigations. To present a complete picture, reporters attempted to tally all work on backlogged kits, not just the parts covered by the federal grant.

For one site – the prosecutor's office in Cuyahoga County, Ohio – reporters used figures from a 2021 study led by Rachel Lovell published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Forensic Sciences.

USA TODAY calculated the ratio of convictions to kits sent for testing for 14 grant recipients that reported the most complete data and received their first grant before fiscal year 2018. We chose that year as a cutoff because those agencies have had more time to test kits, investigate cases and seek convictions. Reporters also determined their ratios of victims contacted to kits sent for testing.

One kit does not always equal one attacker because a serial assailant’s DNA might be present in more than one kit or one rape might include more than one perpetrator. To account for that, reporters created a formula based on Rebecca Campbell’s 2019 study for the U.S. Department of Justice to estimate how many unique offenders are represented in the kits and DNA matches agencies reported.

Given available data, reporters assumed one kit equaled one victim even though some survivors might have had multiple kits in a backlog, which we note in stories.

In addition to data about the outcomes of their programs, USA TODAY requested written victim notification policies from grant recipients and obtained 42 protocols covering about half the agencies. Reporters categorized those policies: A few advocated notifying all survivors whose kits were tested. Some urged notification if there was a DNA match from the test. Others only notified survivors if authorities found their cases were eligible for further investigation or prosecution.

Reporters also gathered and analyzed a variety of other public records to identify trends, such as compiling the criminal histories of suspects in rape cases where kits were not originally tested and reviewing police investigation files from cases recommended to prosecutors.

Jayme Fraser is a data reporter on the USA TODAY investigations team. Contact Fraser at jfraser@gannett.com, @jaymekfraser on Facebook, or on Signal and WhatsApp at (541) 362-1393.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Did America address its rape kit backlog? Here's how USA TODAY measured what happened.