Anya Schultz

Published Jul. 21, 2026at6:00am Add The Standard as a preferred source on Google A decade ago, San Francisco’s Police Commission believed it had solved the city’s rape-kit problem. For years, the evidence swabbed from thousands of victims’ bodies after an alleged sexual assault had sat untested, piling up in the city’s crime lab. When the commissioners learned of the backlog in 2010, they were horrified. “It is an emergency,” commissioner Jim Hammer said at a June hearing that year.

Published Jul. 20, 2026at6:00am The 25-year-old couldn’t stop shaking as she signed a document authorizing nurses at San Francisco General Hospital to catalog her body as a crime scene. She’d moved thousands of miles away from her family to start a career in San Francisco as a mechanical engineer. After a summer spent training for a marathon, her legs should’ve been strong, but they trembled beneath her. Over the next two months, she did everything a rape victim is supposed to do.

Published Jul. 20, 2026at6:00am Add The Standard as a preferred source on Google The Standard’s investigation into how the San Francisco Police Department handles rape cases revealed that a historically understaffed investigative unit is pursuing fewer cases than it has in years. While the public was told the city’s rape-kit scandal had been cleaned up, another problem persists: Alleged rapists are rarely arrested, and alleged rapes are even more rarely prosecuted. 1.