The National Sexual Assault Kit Initiative is a federal grant program administered by the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) that provides funding to support multidisciplinary community response teams to inventory, track, and expeditiously test previously unsubmitted sexual assault kits; produce necessary protocols and policies to improve collaboration among laboratories, police, prosecutors, and victim service providers; provide resources to address the sexual assault investigations and prosecutions that result from evidence and CODIS hits produced by tested sexual assault kits and optimize victim notification protocols and services.
In September 2018, Maryland was awarded a $2.6 million MD SAKI grant to: (1) conduct a statewide inventory, (2) test a portion of the unsubmitted kits, (3) establish a statewide tracking system, and (4) provide victim services.
Under the leadership of Attorney General Anthony G. Brown, the SAEK Committee is the statewide multidisciplinary team that was established to identify best practices and develop uniform statewide policies governing SAEKs. The SAEK Committee is working to ensure that sexual assault victims are supported, offenders are held accountable, and unsubmitted SAEKs never accumulate without a plan of action again. We invite all who share in this belief to work with us to meet this challenge.