Republican Ad Attacks Cooper with Misleading Claim About Rape Kits

Filed 3h ago · Via FactCheck.org · The Buffoon Desk

THIS STORY IS SCORED

Investigations

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Nigel Williams · CC BY-SA 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

A Republican super PAC tied to Trump's MAGA Inc. has spent over $2.3 million on ads claiming Roy Cooper 'let 16,000 untested rape kits sit on the shelf' while attorney general. Fact-checkers found the kits were actually held by more than 500 local law enforcement agencies, never submitted to the state crime lab Cooper oversaw, and their existence wasn't tallied until a 2017 audit law that Cooper himself vetoed as governor before it became law over his veto.

An advocate for rape kit reform told FactCheck.org the backlog was a 'system-wide failure' starting at the local level, where individual detectives decided whether to send kits for testing at all. She noted that if the kits had actually been sitting at the state lab, blame on Cooper would be easy to assign, but that isn't what happened here.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

A $2.3 million ad campaign built on a filing cabinet nobody opened until years later is a strange thing to call a scandal. The actual failure here spans hundreds of local departments and decades of shrugging detectives, which is a much less punchy villain than one attorney general. But punchy sells airtime, and accuracy apparently does not.

Source: Read the original at FactCheck.org → Scored: Investigations · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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