city paper. according to the report, rape survivors historically waited up to 12 hours in d.c. emergency rooms while the ob-gyns present would attend to more immediate emergencies, such as births, after which the invasive exam would be performed by inexperienced residents, who made poor witnesses at trial. the sexual assault nurse examiner (sane) program was established in 2000 at howard university hospital in order to address this concerns, after a decade of attempts by denise snyder, executive director of the d.c. rape crisis center (dcrcc), to find a major hospital willing to host the program, most of whom either cited economic concerns or declined to respond to her inquiries. after howard university adopted the program, survivors encountered the problem of requiring police authorization before receiving a rape examination, which snyder attributes to a desire to maintain low crime rates on the part of law enforcement agencies, whom, according to the washington paper tend to be unsympathetic to alleged rape victims. detective vincent spriggs, of d.c. metro p.d.'s sexual assault unit, cites instances of false or unconvincing rape accusations, and requests for rape kits by women who wish to have pregnancy tests or the morning-after pill administered, as an obstacle to more open use of the kits. in 2008, howard university canceled the sane program, after which it reopened under the supervision of the mayor's office. depictions in media the problem of rape kit backlogs was employed as a significant plot point in "behave", the september 29, 2010 episode of the television crime drama, law & order: special victims unit, which depicts the operations of a police sex crimes unit. in the episode, detectives investigate the case of a woman, played by jennifer love hewitt, who has been raped multiple times by the same man over the course of fifteen years. their investigation leads them to discover that the perpetrator has raped women all over the united states. the detectives attempt to contact the special victims units in other cities, only to discover that most of them have never tested the majority of their collected rape kits. the episode was based on the real-life story of advocate and survivor helena lazaro.