Data Governance and the Temporal Construction of Forensic Evidence: The Making of the First Statewide Rape Kit Tracking Platform

• In Event: (Dis)Trust in Public Sector Data Infrastructures - II: Forensics and Fevers, Testing and Trust

Abstract

Police management of sexual assault kits (SAKs) has led to systemic disorganization resulting in lost, forgotten, and abandoned forensic evidence. In response, advocates champion “sexual assault kit tracking platforms” as a pillar of rape kit reform. In 2017, Idaho became the first state to fully implement a statewide platform, the Idaho Sexual Assault Kit Tracking System (IKTS). While a step in confronting the systemic disorganization of evidence, SAK tracking platforms raise urgent questions about what governance paradigms, data relations, and discourses these systems enable.

This paper asks: (1) How are discourses of “evidence” constructed in the legislative debate about IKTS? (2) What data relationships and governance paradigms do evidentiary discourses in IKTS enable? (3) How do evidentiary discourses draw on race, gender, and sexuality systems for meaning in IKTS? Using insights from critical race theory and STS, I answer these questions through a discursive analysis of state laws governing IKTS and SAK evidence, legislative committee hearings, annual reports to the legislature, IKTS protocols, and media coverage of Idaho’s backlog between 2010 and 2020.

I find concerns about “timeliness” and the temporal life of forensic evidence structured the creation and maintenance of IKTS. I argue timeliness is a data governance paradigm with multiple and shifting meanings of temporality that comprise various legal, social, and data relationships. The discourse of tardy, slow, and untimely forensic evidence is used to codify transparency and centralize legal decision making. By eliminating police discretion, IKTS protocols intervene into longstanding sexist and racist evidence testing decision-making. However, this intervention should not be read as a racial justice technofix.

Author

• Renee Shelby, Northwestern University