Nashville police say a long-running sexual assault evidence backlog is moving in the right direction, with new funding helping the city process kits that have left survivors waiting for answers. The progress is real, but the backlog is not gone.
The Metro Nashville Police Department’s crime lab is working through delayed evidence processing with help from increased funding, according to WKRN News 2. The update arrives as Nashville continues shifting some testing to outside laboratories while expanding the capacity of its own forensic operation.
In June, WPLN News reported that Metro Council had approved a $250,000 recurring federal grant that would allow police to send 183 untested kits to a laboratory with more capacity. After that batch was processed, Nashville was expected to have about 200 untested kits remaining.
The federal money was formally accepted in May through a Metro Council resolution authorizing the Nashville police department to outsource sexual assault kits to private vendors for forensic analysis. The grant was awarded through the U.S. Department of Justice’s DNA Capacity Enhancement for Backlog Reduction program and requires no local cash match, according to Metro Council records.
That effort follows an additional $107,000 grant approved in March from the Nashville Police + Public Safety Alliance for outside testing of sexual assault kits. The grant period runs through January 2027, giving the department another tool for keeping the backlog from simply moving from one queue to another, according to a separate Metro resolution.
Nashville’s own crime laboratory is a 47,000-square-foot facility above the Madison Police Precinct, with 61 staff members working across forensic biology, chemistry, firearms, latent prints, evidence receiving and other units. The city says the lab has been accredited since 2015 and was most recently assessed for continued compliance in 2024, according to Nashville.gov.
The Backlog Is Smaller, Not Gone
For survivors, faster processing can mean more than a completed laboratory report; it can determine whether an investigation gains a new lead or a case remains stalled. Rachel Freeman, CEO of the Sexual Assault Center, told WPLN that long waits can prolong the emotional toll of navigating the justice system, even as Nashville makes progress.
The broader state picture has also improved. A Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations report found that the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation’s average in-house turnaround time for sex-offense requests fell from 45.4 weeks in August 2022 to 10.9 weeks in May 2025, reaching the agency’s stated eight-to-12-week goal at that point, according to the TACIR report.
Nashville’s next challenge is making the improvement durable. Outsourcing can clear older evidence more quickly, but sustained staffing, funding and tracking will determine whether the city prevents another backlog from building behind the one it is now trying to erase.
