Of the 170 rape kits the San Francisco Police Department processed in the first half of 2026, it marked 132 — roughly 78% — as "inactive," and cleared just 24, according to the department's own semi-annual filing to the Police Commission. Even 23 hits to the FBI's offender DNA database were not enough to keep most cases moving.

The figures matter because SFPD reported them itself, in the exact document the Standard revealed the department had failed to publish for a decade. The Jan. 1–Jun. 30, 2026 Sexual Assault Evidence Kit report — mandated by Police Commission Resolution 16-28 — shows the problem is not slow lab work: kits were tested in an average of 34 days. The bottleneck is what happens after. As the Board of Supervisors prepares a fall hearing and the Police Commission summons SFPD leadership, the department's own ledger is now the clearest evidence against it.

San Francisco's failure to solve rapes has a paper trail, and the police wrote it themselves.

Under Police Commission Resolution 16-28 (external source, opens in a new tab), SFPD must report twice a year on how it collects, tests, and follows up on sexual assault evidence kits. The most recent filing, covering January through June 2026, lays out the pipeline in plain numbers. Of 170 kits processed, the crime lab turned them around in an average of 34 days — fast by any standard. Eighty produced a foreign DNA profile uploaded to CODIS, the FBI's national offender database, and 23 of those returned a match to a known profile.

Then the trail goes cold. Under "case status," the department lists 132 inactive cases, 24 cleared or closed, and 14 open — meaning about 78% of the kits it handled in that window were shelved, and roughly 14% cleared. The report's own reasons for inactivity include an uploaded DNA profile that has "not yet identified" a suspect, and a victim who "becomes uncooperative or refused any further contact."

Those percentages are not an outside critic's math. They are the department's, and they track almost exactly with the findings that touched off a citywide reckoning this summer. A yearlong investigation by The San Francisco Standard's Anya Schultz reported that SFPD solved roughly one in seven reported rapes in 2025 (external source, opens in a new tab) — about half the national rate and, over five years, the lowest clearance of any large California county. The Standard also documented a Special Victims Unit that had shrunk from 60 investigators in 2019 to 31, even as reports climbed, and a reliance on "pretext calls" — asking victims to phone their alleged attacker for a recorded confession — before cases were allowed to lapse.

Under "case status," the department lists 132 inactive cases, 24 cleared or closed, and 14 open — meaning about 78% of the kits it handled in that window were shelved, and roughly 14% cleared.

That reporting is now colliding with the political calendar. Supervisor Myrna Melgar said she would call a hearing on the city's handling of sexual assault once the board returns from its August recess, with Public Safety Committee chair Matt Dorsey cosponsoring. Dorsey argued the low odds of an arrest send a chilling signal not only to survivors but to perpetrators — that accountability in San Francisco, as he put it to the Standard (external source, opens in a new tab), is "remote." Supervisor Chyanne Chen, who said she has assigned a legislative aide to the issue, described a system that re-traumatizes survivors while failing to deliver justice. The Police Commission separately voted to haul SFPD leadership before it to answer for the record.

Advocates say the semi-annual report only sharpens a point they have pressed for years: speed at the lab means little if cases die on a shelf afterward. Testing kits quickly and then shelving them, said Beverly Upton, executive director of the San Francisco Domestic Violence Consortium, is "just not enough."

SFPD has defended its handling of the cases, calling them the unit's "highest priority" and attributing inactivity to a lack of additional evidence, spokesperson Evan Sernoffsky told the Standard. The department's own H1 2026 numbers are the benchmark the fall hearing will measure it against.