“Hundreds” of rapists could be roaming free in New York City because NYPD officers failed to retrieve DNA evidence from area hospitals for analysis in a “complete breakdown” of the system, The Post has learned.
The shocking revelation quietly emerged weeks ago, when rape kits in dozens of active cases were found languishing in hospital storage, stunned police sources said this week.
“The total number of released rape kits citywide that should have been picked up by SVD [Special Victims Division] detectives may total several hundred,” said an NYPD source, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of reprisal.
A law enacted in December 2022 requires rape kits previously stored in hospitals — because victims decided not to file criminal reports — be moved to a centralized location in Albany, where they’ll be warehoused for 20 years and can be retrieved if victims change their minds on pressing charges.
The new law spurred hospital administrators citywide to begin cataloging rape kits in their storage rooms.
They were shocked to discover that along with the inactive evidence kits, scores of “released” rape kits where cooperating victims wanted NYPD involvement were also gathering dust.
A rape kit is collected at an emergency room where a victim seeks treatment and hospital staff conduct a Sexual Assault Forensic Exam.
Bodily fluids including semen and saliva are collected with swabs, and substances like hair and clothing fibers may also be collected.
The victim then chooses to “release” the kit to cops to investigate or decides to take no immediate action — with the assurance that the kit will be put in storage.
If a victim decides to release, detectives from the Special Victims Division are supposed to pick up the kit from the hospital and take it to the NYPD lab in Queens.
It is then delivered to the city Medical Examiner’s Office, which conducts a forensic analysis to find DNA matches in a criminal database.
The mothballed kits still sitting in hospital storage rooms suggests cops failed to fully investigate, analyze or seek matches in many cases, which means a serial rapist could could be roaming the city and looking for his next victim, one advocate warned.
“The rape kit plays a really important role in these investigations,” said Jane Manning, director of the Women’s Equal Justice Project and a former sex crimes prosecutor. “Sometimes, that’s how you connect cases and identify a serial rapist you didn’t know was a serial rapist.”
It is unknown how many ignored active kits have been found because a full audit hasn’t been done of all 60 hospitals in the city where rape examinations are conducted, the NYPD source said.
But the number could be shockingly high.
At Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn and Mt. Sinai Hospital in Manhattan alone, up to 100 rape kits for active cases were not picked up by SVD at each facility over the past five years, law enforcement sources said.
“If there’s even a few dozen kits in each of those two hospitals, and you multiply that times the number of hospitals that there are in New York City, then it could be a huge problem,” one victims’ advocate said.
“It just shows there’s a breakdown in the system,” said Ilse Knecht, director of policy and advocacy for the Joyful Heart Foundation, a sexual assault survivors group, who was briefed on the predicament.
“Every kit counts. Every kit really represents a survivor,” she said.
“These are supposed to be active investigations if the survivor made a report and is giving permission for the kit to be tested,” said a victims’ advocate, who asked not to be identified.
“So what’s happened to those investigations?”
The issue of the neglected rape kits was raised with SVD Deputy Chief Carlos Ortiz and SVD attorney Kathleen Baer recently, police sources said.
Baer, who was hired by the NYPD earlier this year under former Police Commissioner Keychant Sewell, brought the problem to the attention of other city hospitals and has been working to resolve it, advocates said.
An NYPD spokesperson told The Post the department is putting in place “safeguards to ensure that no kits are left in hospital storage that have permission for release to law enforcement.”
They refused to say how many of the kits have fallen through the cracks.
The revelations come amid a federal probe launched last year by the U.S. Department of Justice into allegations that SVD officers failed to conduct basic investigatory steps and engaged in a “pattern or practice” of gender-biased policing, according to the DOJ.
That investigation was spurred by more than a dozen New York sexual assault survivors penned a letter to DOJ requesting it investigate the embattled division.
Former SVD Commander Chief Michael Osgood, who was removed after a 2018 city Department of Investigation audit of the troubled unit, said the newest blunder is evidence of “deep structural flaws in the NYPD’s Detective Bureau that has resulted in systemic bias to women.”
Osgood, who claimed in a wrongful termination lawsuit he was removed from his post for helping investigators, said it’s likely the kits weren’t picked up because officers’ caseloads are too large or because of a lack of supervision and poor training.
“A rape victim’s trauma from the assault is doubled when they are failed by the police,” Osgood said. “And that failure haunts them their entire lives.”