This is the Kato Daily Podcast for Friday, March 16, 2018. I'm Caleb Brown.

Rape is among the worst crimes one can commit and yet police departments have

massive backlogs of untested rape kits that could provide evidence in those

cases. How is it possible that police seem less than interested in solving these violent crimes.

Clark Neely, Vice President for Criminal Justice at the Cato Institute, comments.

This has been a problem both in my home state of Kentucky. It's a problem in Virginia. It's a problem in

North Carolina and I assume it's a problem in many other states and that is

rape kits the sometimes the only piece of

information that police have to identify a rapist go untested and at

least in one case in Virginia one rape kit went back to the 80s in terms of and

it just just they just sit there and I can't imagine why.

Yeah, it seems to be a real problem, this sort of epidemic of untested rape kids.

It is difficult to understand how this could possibly happen.

It's such a serious crime.

It's oftentimes involving you

know serial rapists so it's incredibly important that the person be

identified and prosecuted and taken off the street and all I can think of is that it and a real challenge just to identify the perpetrator and then to get a conviction and perhaps

it's the case that police are reluctant to investigate these cases or put less emphasis on them because they're more challenging.

So when you consider what I assume is the public outcry for, or I should say public outrage when they look when the public

learns that rape kids are going untested and presumably rapists are not being

identified is it possible at least that maybe police don't test

rape kits because the likelihood of identifying some sort of random rapist is very

...