WTF?! San Francisco police linked a woman to a crime using DNA from her rape exam

[Jedi Guy]

22. Not sure what you mean by, "yet this is what is done."

This is the consequence of a law that was created because of the nationwide backlog of rape kits. It was created specifically to ensure that information garnered via those kits was processed and entered in a timely fashion. All the data goes into a database so if a match is found later, it'll result in a hit.

That's all that happened here. This wasn't and isn't some sort of conspiracy against this woman in particular or women in general on the part of law enforcement or the state of California. The law is written in such a way that it doesn't specify that only the rapist's DNA goes in. So the lab dutifully entered the data, and then this woman's DNA was gathered from the scene of a different crime, processed, and resulted in a hit.

In just about any major police department, property crimes and sex crimes are handled by different units staffed by different officers. So the officers dealing with the property crime case had absolutely no way of knowing that they'd get a hit on DNA from a rape kit.

This is an example of the law of unintended consequences rather than evidence of malice on the part of any of the actors involved.