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Next month, a private organization affiliated with the federal Department of Justice will begin a 36-month evaluation of sexual-assault investigations in Salt Lake City.
Salt Lake City Police Chief Chris Burbank said Friday analysts from the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) funded through the DOJ's Office of Violence Against Women would have access to all aspects of rape investigations.
"We have seen a growing concern on how sexual-assault cases are handled in Salt Lake City and across the nation," Burbank said. "I want to see firsthand if we are doing the right thing — and can we improve?"
Salt Lake City is one of four participating law-enforcement jurisdictions in the study that is intended to yield "best practices" for investigating sex assaults.
The police department has come under scrutiny from the City Council for not analyzing 79 percent of the Code R kits that contain forensic evidence in reported rapes from 2003 to 2011.
But Salt Lake City is hardly alone. Most major cities across the country have significant backlogs of unprocessed rape kits.
The phenomenon has spawned a national movement that seeks to make mandatory the analysis of all such Code R kits gathered after an alleged sex assault.
But Burbank has held that analyzing all Code R kits is not an efficient use of resources, particularly in cases where the suspect is known. "Putting all our resources into one type of crime is inefficient," he said.
The chief added that he does not believe his department has a "major problem."
"I think we do things a little better [than most places]," he said. But he pushed to be part of the study because "our responsibility is to the civil rights of everybody — victims and the accused."
The chief said the study findings — good, bad or indifferent — would be made public.