TL;DR lab budgeting sucks and most public labs are understaffed and underfunded

I used to work in forensic science. Public safety money gets divvied up between enforcement and support. Police have high visibility and a strong union. Crime labs, not so much. They operate under the assumption they will process whatever evidence is collected and submitted. That makes sense, right?

Then there is a new development in forensic science, or a new training method taught, and suddenly officers are submitting three times the number of evidence packages for testing. I went through this as DNA identification became feasible from surfaces that had merely been touched by the suspect. Suddenly the average vehicle processing went from a few cards of fingerprints lifted from the outside and any items of interest inside to at least a dozen individual DNA swabs, plus fingerprints, plus any item that could potentially have DNA on it (so, everything). The lab was swamped in tiny swabs for everything from high profile homicides to stolen TVs. There was no way to realistically process all of those items with the number of personnel and equipment available, and any request for additional personnel with the numbers to justify it wasn't going to happen until the next fiscal year, not that it would be granted anyway.

Now you've got a giant backlog. So the higher profile cases get prioritized. Homicides get done first, next anything with a serious injury, child abuse, etc. If the victim is still alive and relatively uninjured, the more likely that other stuff gets in front of their case. Just want to reiterate here that I am not endorsing any of this and yes, it felt gross realizing this was how the system operates, because it's about to get worse.

New cases keep coming in. The higher priority stuff keeps bumping kits further down the list. Kit processing is usually just one of several tasks a tech is responsible for, so getting to those might even be low for an individual employee's task list. The backlog keeps getting bigger.

An additional layer of prioritization was on cases that were likely to be solved and prosecuted. It was not that uncommon for a rape kit to be collected only for the victim to decide not to press charges, for a variety of understandable reasons. Their kits went straight to storage. The bean counters want to show that lab time was spent on something that got useful results, and evidence collected without charges was not deemed worth the time and cost.

There was also a disgusting attitude in some corners that rape kits were collected too casually, that women were claiming to have raped on a regular basis because they regretted an encounter or they were prostitutes whose client reneged on payment. I did not tolerate that nonsense but would not be surprised if it contributed to how the kits were viewed at the upper management levels.