Justice Department Awards $1.5 Million to Louisiana State Police for Sexual Assault Kit Initiative

U.S. Attorney Ronald C. Gathe, Jr. announced that the Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Assistance has awarded $1,500,000 to Louisiana State Police for the National Sexual Assault Kit Initiative (SAKI) to research, review, and collect lawfully-owed DNA from arrestees and convicted offenders for enrollment in the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) in hopes that they will return hits to generate new investigative information in unsolved cases.

The Louisiana State Police Crime Lab (LSPCL) in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is responsible for receiving, verifying acceptability, and analyzing lawfully-owed arrestee and convicted offender DNA collections, as well as developing and uploading DNA profiles into the CODIS database. LSPCL also retains the collected DNA samples for match verification and other quality assurance purposes. The State of Louisiana began collecting and enrolling lawfully owed convicted offender samples into CODIS in 2002 and has been a trailblazer regarding lawfully owed arrestee collections, becoming the first state in the country to collect and enroll lawfully owed arrestee samples into CODIS (2003), and analyze lawfully-owed arrestee samples as a part of the booking process using Rapid DNA technology (2022).

For more information about these awards, please contact the OJP Office of Communications at 202-307-0703 or [email protected].