AG’s office establishes permanent Sexual Assault Investigations Support Team as federal grant ends

The state's nearly decade-long initiative to improve the handling of sexual assault investigations entered a new era this week.

What began with federal funding in 2017 as the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative is now a permanent, state-funded Sexual Assault Investigations Support Team in the Attorney General's Office after the federal grant officially ended Wednesday.

"I'm proud of the many AG employees past and present who contributed to this work over the last nine years to bring justice and healing to victims, survivors, and their families," said Brown. "This work is far from over. Justice must be served. We will work with our local law enforcement partners to support the effective investigation and prosecution of these cases."

In 2017, Washington faced significant challenges inventorying, tracking, and testing sexual assault kits, as well as the status of related investigations. Statewide, there were more than 10,000 untested sexual assault kits, mostly housed in local police stations. That same year, the state was awarded a federal grant to start the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative.

Over the next nine years, the AG's office worked with local law enforcement agencies and with crime labs to identify and test each of the more than 10,000 assault kits. The last of the kits that the crime lab tested as part of this grant was in May 2026.

As a result, at least 22 cases have been solved, a number that is expected to grow with many investigations ongoing. The AG's office facilitated the uploading of 4,186 DNA profiles to the national database to assist with investigations, with more than 2,000 of those DNA profiles resulting in a "hit" on the database as matching either an offender already in the system or DNA related to another crime. This DNA evidence will be useful to investigators in Washington and other states for years to come.

In 2019, the AG's office started the related "Lawfully Owned DNA" project, which identified convicted Washington offenders who were supposed to have submitted a DNA sample upon conviction, but no sample was ever collected. The AG's office identified these individuals and worked with local law enforcement to collect and inventory DNA samples. Since the beginning of this work approximately 4,000 new DNA samples have been collected. Some of those samples are a result of more recent convictions.

As the federal grant which supported this work was winding down, the AG's office successfully obtained funding from the Legislature in 2024 to continue this work on a permanent basis. On September 30, the federal grant officially ended.

The AG's Sexual Assault Investigations Support Team will support local law enforcement on investigations, prosecutions, cold case reviews, anti-human trafficking work, and data collection and analysis on sexual assault and human trafficking cases. The team has also received a federal grant to coordinate hospital responses to reports of sexual and special assaults by Washington forensic nurse examiners. This work will improve access to care for victims and survivors and maximize the chances that the perpetrators will be successfully brought to justice.

Learn more about the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative.

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