It’s disappointing and disconcerting to see how lacks-adaisical police departments across Pennsylvania have been in responding to an effort to improve the handling of rape cases.

About 1,020 police departments across Pennsylvania were supposed to report how many untested rape kits they had as of Dec. 31, 2015. Only 338 agencies — including state police, which serve 1,698 municipalities across Pennsylvania — actually provided information.

Butler County is no exception. On Tuesday the Eagle reported that fewer than half of the police departments in Butler County had complied with a state law requiring them to report how many rape kits are in their possession.

That leaves a serious gap in the data we have regarding the state’s backlog of untested rape kits — pegged at 1,852 as of last year. That’s the number of rape kits that have been waiting for at least a year to be tested and are part of active investigations.

The real number of kits caught up in the testing backlog is likely to be higher than what we know now, as hundreds of municipalities have been left out of that count by virtue of their failure to comply with the law — something for which there’s simply no excuse.

Pennsylvania Auditor General Eugene DePasquale has said that his office is looking into the response rate and will issue a report sometime around October, with the goal of finding ways to improve the reporting process.

In the meantime, police departments in Butler County that are not in compliance with the state’s new reporting guidelines need to immediately provide the information they are legally obligated to report. It is a vital part of Pennsylvania’s efforts to improve the handling of rape cases throughout the state — which in turn is part of an even larger effort to improve rape investigations nationwide.

According to the FBI, every seven minutes a rape occurs somewhere in this country — and yet fewer than half of reported assaults result in an arrest.

One way to improve that rate is to identify the scope of the testing backlog, clear it, and take steps to prevent such an irresponsible state of affairs from ever happening again. That effort will not be successful unless the departments actually investigating these crimes fully and enthusiastically participate in the collection of information and the development of more robust policies to ensure evidence is processed in a timely manner.

Pennsylvania is not alone in confronting this issue. Police departments across the nation are struggling to deal with untested rape kits. But there is no excuse for simply ignoring the problem, which is effectively what the unresponsive departments are doing.