SF Supervisors call for hearing after Standard rape-kit investigation 68%
By Anya Schultz72%
7/22/2026, 1:00:00 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 24 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Emotion, Confirmation Bias, and Framing Effect, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 40.9% saturation with 360 hits. Analysis detected 1,848 faulty-reasoning hits from 881 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 61.9% and a BS Rank of 68% (6,433 of 19,729 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 67.40% of the article peer group.
The Board of Supervisors will hold a hearing into the San Francisco Police Department’s poor record on rape investigations, following a report by The Standard .
The SFPD cleared just 14% of rape cases last year — half the national rate, and the lowest of any large California county over the past five years.
“The only thing worse than the message that sends to survivors of sexual assault is the message it sends to rapists — that the odds of ever being held accountable in San Francisco are remote,” Supervisor Matt Dorsey told The Standard.
Supervisor Myrna Melgar told The Standard she will call the hearing.
Dorsey, who chairs the Public Safety and Neighborhood Services Committee, will cosponsor.
While rape kits get tested quickly, The Standard found that cases get quietly shelved: 78% of last year’s rape-kit cases sat inactive, including cases with DNA matches to suspects already in the FBI’s database.
“Sexual violence is just unacceptable — full stop,” Mayor Daniel Lurie told The Standard on Tuesday.
“We need to go after those that commit those types of heinous crimes.
We need to hold them accountable, we need to prosecute them, and I’ll be working with PD to do that.”
The Standard reported on an alleged rape reported to the SFPD in July 2025.
The woman, a 25-year-old engineer, went to the ER for a rape exam within hours of the alleged assault, and the DNA from her rape kit came back as a match to the man she had identified to police.
It took 12 days for the SFPD to assign her case to an investigator in the Special Victims Unit, which handles sexual assault cases.
The investigator asked her to make a “pretext call,” a recorded phone call in which victims attempt to elicit confessions from suspects — a tactic the SFPD routinely relies on in sexual assault cases, The Standard found.
In the 25-year-old’s case, the man she alleged raped her didn’t pick up the phone, and she said she was told by a police investigator this meant her case would no longer be investigated.
“ I was so outraged reading her story,” said Melgar.
The hearing, which will be scheduled after the supervisors return from the August recess, will follow up on one Melgar called in May 2025 regarding Special Victims Unit staffing levels.
The Standard reported that the SVU staff shrank at twice the rate as the SFPD overall, dropping from 60 investigators in 2019 to 31 today.
“We need a fully staffed SVU,” Supervisor Stephen Sherrill told The Standard.
“When we talk about rebuilding the ranks of our police force, it isn’t an amorphous statistic — it has actual consequences.”
Supervisor Chyanne Chen said she has assigned one of her legislative aides to focus on the city’s handling of sexual assault cases, in response to The Standard’s reporting.
“We are retraumatizing survivors of violence and failing to carry out justice on their behalf,” Chen said.
“Clearly we need to do more here to honor survivors and pursue justice,” Supervisor Danny Sauter told The Standard, adding that he’s “in dialogue with colleagues to see how the board can bring both more resources and accountability” to the SFPD’s handling of sexual assault cases.
Supervisor Jackie Fielder said The Standard’s report left her “deeply disturbed” by the way San Francisco handles rape cases.
“We have failed to stand up meaningful and effective interventions to not only end the violence, but provide the survivors, who have been through absolute trauma, with meaningful avenues for justice against their attackers,” she said.
“San Francisco should and absolutely can do better.”
Melgar said she intends to push for an increase in funding for the Mayor’s Office of Victims’ Rights, which has “been pushing for more resources and a better coordination between the DA and the SFPD in terms of increasing the rate at which [sexual assault cases] are investigated and charged.”
The Mayor’s Office of Victims’ Rights was voted into existence in 2022, through a ballot measure written by Assemblymember Catherine Stefani when she was a city supervisor.
“The office is already doing vital work, but it is unacceptable that it still has not been fully funded,” Stefani told The Standard.
The SFPD defended its handling of sexual assault cases.
“The SFPD takes sexual assault cases extremely seriously, and our investigators work tirelessly on every case, which are our highest priority,” said spokesperson Evan Sernoffsky.
The Standard asked why the rate of inactive cases has risen so sharply since the department cleared its rape-kit backlog a decade ago.
“The SFPD currently has no backlog of cases that need to be submitted for DNA analysis or crime lab testing.
This process is typically completed within 30 days,” Sernoffsky said.
“If there is no additional evidence from a [rape kit], the case may become inactive pending any additional evidence.”
Victims advocates say fast testing means little if cases go nowhere.
“To think that they’re testing [rape kits] within a timely manner, and they’re just shelving them — it’s just not enough,” said Beverly Upton, executive director of San Francisco Domestic Violence Consortium, which comprises nonprofits focused on sexual assault.
“We made such good progress in 2016, but clearly there’s still more work to do.”
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