The Louisiana State Police Crime Lab has launched a statewide sexual assault kit tracking program as a result of a law approved in 2023. Captain Chad Guidry with the crime lab says this will make the tracking process more transparent for survivors.
“The program is to actually create a portal for survivors of sexual assault to go and track the progress of their sexual assault kits from the collection time all the way to the prosecution time,” he explains.
As a result of two laws authored by Senator Beth Mizell of Franklinton, Louisiana now requires law enforcement to take a kit within 72 hours of collection at a medical facility, and submit the reported kit to crime labs within 30 days. Guidry says the program is helpful not only for survivors, as it ensures they know where their kit is in that process, but for law enforcement too, since “it also takes and holds the crime labs and law enforcement and everybody accountable for the progress of the kits.”
For survivors, the program looks like a portal on the LSP website they can put their kit number into and see where it is. For law enforcement, the portal shows where the kit is and which departments have already handled it. What the portal does not show, Guidry says, is personal information: “There is no personal, identifiable information that’s entered into the system, so there’s no risk of any information being released on the victim or survivor’s side.”
The Tracking System and Survivor Portal can be found under the Services tab at LSP.org.
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