RICHMOND, Va. — Attorney General Mark R. Herring and the Department of Forensic Science are launching Virginia’s first-ever statewide Physical Evidence Recovery Kits tracking system, an electronic tracking system that will allow survivors, DFS, law enforcement agencies, and hospitals to know the status and location of a PERK kit at any given moment.
The new PERK tracking system was developed as part of Attorney General Herring’s ongoing project in conjunction with DFS, law enforcement agencies, survivors, and victim advocates to transform the way Virginia responds to sexual and domestic violence.
The new system will be tracking each step in the process, including their distribution as uncollected kits to collection sites (e.g., hospitals) through collection, transfer to law enforcement, submission to the laboratory for analysis, and return to the law enforcement agency for storage.
All agencies handling kits will be required to update the status of each kit, and survivors may use the system to check the status of the analysis of their kits at any time.
The system will notify law enforcement users when collected kits have not been timely submitted for analysis. Attorney General Herring said that this will provide an important measure of accountability, and will provide law enforcement agencies and hospitals with a useful tool to manage their kits and inventories.
"In years past, survivors often had no idea whether their kit had actually been tested, and we found out it often hadn’t been, which is so disrespectful to a survivor and really undermined trust in the system. We’ve made so much progress over the last few years to empower survivors, improve communication and transparency, and implement trauma-informed, survivor-centered, practices, and this new system is going to be yet another big step forward,” said Attorney General Herring. “With this new system, survivors, as well as hospitals, labs, and law enforcement agencies, will know exactly what’s happening with a kit, where it is physically located, and where it is in the testing process at any given moment. I want to thank our great partners at DFS for all their hard work and dedication in bringing this project to life.”
The system also includes protections to ensure survivors’ privacy. No personal information will be stored in the system, access will be restricted to only the information a particular user might need, and kits will be monitored solely by their tracking number.
The tracking system has been in an ongoing soft launch since June. It will be mandatory starting July 1, 2020.
The system will ultimately cost about $100,000, all of which is covered by a $2 million Sexual Assault Kit Initiative (SAKI) grant secured in 2017 by Attorney General Herring and DFS.