Schimel Haunted By Rape Kit Issue

Brad Schimel. File photo by Coburn Dukehart / Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism.

Brad Schimel knows it’s an issue that could come back to bite him. After serving a four-year term as Wisconsin Attorney General, the Republican lost his bid for reelection to Democratic opponent Josh Kaul. Kaul charged that Schimel delayed and took years clearing a huge backlog of untested rape kits. The issue helped Kaul win a very tight election.

Schimel has since served as a Waukesha County Circuit Court judge and is running as a conservative choice for the Wisconsin Supreme Court. He wasted no time taking on the rape kit backlog issue, releasing an introductory campaign ad two weeks ago touting all the ways he fought for justice, including “Leading the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative, clearing 4,000 backlogged tests so survivors could finally get justice.”

One week later his liberal opponent for the high court, Dane County Circuit Court Susan Crawford, released an ad attacking Kaul:

“Brad Schimel. He let 6,000 rape kits sit untested for two years, while survivors waited for justice,” the ad declared.

So who’s right? Did he clear 4,000 kits or let 6,000 sit untested or are both claims wrong? Here are the facts:

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.

But Ballweg said Schimel’s office would now be using the grant money to send 200 rape kits per month to a private lab for testing “until all kits are tested.”

But by mid-May of 2017, more than three months later, his office admitted that just 63 of the more than 6,000 rape kits had so far been tested.

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?

At a March 2017 legislative budget hearing, Schimel told lawmakers “We wanted the grant process to move faster. It couldn’t move faster.” Yet he added: “I’m proud of our progress.” This was at a point where less than one percent of all the backlogged rape kits had been tested.

Moreover his office offered a different view “behind the scenes,” a story by Kyle noted: “In an application for federal aid two years ago, they described ‘disturbing’ resistance to the testing of rape kits from police throughout Wisconsin.”

Schimel was then the state’s highest law enforcement officer. If police departments were dragging their feet on testing of rape kits, why didn’t he use the bully pulpit to urge them to take action?

Perhaps because his own office was just as laggard. The Green Bay police, for instance, reported in 2014 that they had 322 untested rape kits, yet not one of them reached crime labs until police actually drove them to Madison in June 2017, as Kyle reported.

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.

In his campaign against Schimel, Kaul contrasted Wisconsin’s efforts with those of Portland, Oregon. “The Portland Police Department and the local district attorney received grants for testing at the same time as Wisconsin,” Kyle reported. “But Portland — a single city — tested more than three times as many kits as the entire state of Wisconsin during the first 2½ years.”

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 he 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?