MADISON, Wis. – In case you missed it, Brad Schimel’s disastrous handling of the rape kit backlog under his tenure as Attorney General continues to haunt him today. Despite receiving millions of dollars in federal grants to address the backlog, Schimel only tested nine out of over 6,000 rape kits in two years, leaving dangerous predators on the streets and denying victims the justice they deserved.
“The ghosts of Brad Schimel’s failures on rape kits continue to haunt him to this day. On the campaign trail, Schimel is nowadays trying to claim his failures on rape kits is ‘old history’ — but the facts are clear: he let over 6,000 rape kits sit untested for more than two years, delaying justice and letting dangerous predators remain on the streets,” said campaign spokesman Derrick Honeyman. “Brad Schimel doesn’t take the safety and wellbeing of Wisconsinites seriously, and this April, voters will reject his soft-on-crime record once again.”
See more from Urban Milwaukee:
Urban Milwaukee: Schimel Haunted By Rape Kit Issue
- In October 2014, one month before Schimel was elected as Attorney General the Journal Sentinel reported that there were 6,006 untested rape kits in Wisconsin.
- Schimel took office in January 2015 and said little about the backlog until September when he announced his office had won two grants totaling $4 million grant from the District Attorney of New York and the U.S. Department of Justice, to inventory and process any untested rape kits. “This money will go a long way to bring justice to survivors of sexual assault,” Schimel declared in his press release. “We owe it to those who had the courage to report a sexual assault… to now test their kits, investigate their cases, and hold their perpetrators accountable.”
- But a year later an Appleton Post Crescent story by Keegan Kyle revealed that not one kit had been tested. Democratic U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin wrote a letter to Schimel saying she was troubled by the delay and called for a “renewed sense of urgency” on the project.
- By then the federal government had awarded Wisconsin another $1.1 million to process the backlogged kits. So Schimel now had $5.1 million to address the problem. When asked about the effort four months later, in January 2017, Schimel said his office had tested “hundreds” of untested kits, but two days later his spokeswoman Rebecca Ballweg admitted that just nine untested rape kits had so far been processed, as the Green Bay Press Gazette reported.
- Studies had by then showed that serial sexual offenders were more common than previously thought. A 2016 report by Case Western Reserve University found that of 243 rape kits studied in 2013, at least 51 percent were linked to offenders of multiple sex crimes. Yet Schimel seemed to be doing nothing to process the rape kits after getting $5 million in grant money to pay for this. Why?
- Schimel might also have been looking to save money, Kyle’s reporting suggested, because rape kits can cost about $1,000 each to test. But even at that price, the $5.1 million in grant money could have paid for testing 5,100 rape kits.
- But by delaying, Schimel actually cost taxpayers more. To handle the embarrassing failure to process the rape kits Schimel “authorized more overtime and hired 11 part-time workers in an effort to speed up testing,” Kyle reported. Meanwhile the backlog of untested kits continued to grow and reached 6,800 at its peak. Yet even with the extra overtime spending, Schimel’s office had by June 2018, tested only 1,900 rape kits — two years and eight months after getting two grants to take care of the problem. The entire story of Schimel’s ineptitude was covered by Urban Milwaukee in 2018.
- By the fall of 2018, in time for the November election, Schimel announced he had cleared 4,000 sexual assault kits, which is the number he now touts. How much that cost taxpayers in overtime has never been tabulated.
- Nor does he mention how long he delayed doing this. If anything Crawford’s ad underplays that. Schimel took office in January 2015 and by May 2017, two years and four months later, he had cleared just 63 kits out of the backlog of 6003 kits, despite getting three different grants totaling $5.1 million to pay for this.
- Whether this delay was due to incompetence or because Schimel is insensitive to the needs of women, which Crawford’s ad suggests, the issue that goes beyond the usual right vs. left debates and raises a simple question: is this the sort of bungling attorney voters should promote to the highest court in the state?