Arizona DPS to start charging law enforcement agencies for forensic services

[rat­ings]
For years there have been rumors about the Arizona Department of Public Safety mak­ing the tran­si­tion to a fee-for-service crime lab­o­ra­tory. With the state’s cur­rent bud­get short­fall, it seems the leg­is­la­ture is finally seri­ous about shift­ing the expenses asso­ci­ated with foren­sic test­ing to local law enforce­ment agencies.

Details are spelled out in a doc­u­ment called “FY 2009 Enacted Budget July 2, 2008 — Updated” that can be down­loaded and read here. On page 36 of the doc­u­ment, there is a line item bud­get reduc­tion listed as :

“$(7.8) mil­lion for the depart­ment to charge local law enforce­ment agen­cies for crime lab services.”

For the state, gone would be the days of an over­worked and under­funded crime lab. Rather than foot­ing the bill for foren­sic test­ing to the more than 200 Arizona law enforce­ment agen­cies it cur­rently sup­ports, DPS would pass this eco­nomic bur­den down the line to the local level and start charg­ing for their foren­sic ser­vices. Sections of the DPS crime lab sys­tem are devel­op­ing fee sched­ules for their services.

Of course the goal is to reduce the eco­nomic bur­den on the state. But what hap­pens if local law enforce­ment agen­cies sim­ply can’t afford to pay for DPS foren­sic ser­vices? It would be eco­nom­i­cally respon­si­ble for law enforce­ment agen­cies to shop around and see if the pri­vate sec­tor might not be able to offer more cost-effective solu­tions for their foren­sic needs.

DPS doesn’t have a monop­oly on foren­sic ser­vices. Many pri­vate foren­sic pro­fes­sion­als in the state are highly qual­i­fied, can per­form analy­sis quicker and for less money than what a gov­ern­ment agency would likely charge. There has been talk for years about a full-service pri­vate foren­sic lab­o­ra­tory in Arizona. I should know, I’ve been approached sev­eral times by dif­fer­ent parties.

If the state crime lab does tran­si­tion to fee-for-service, it’s an excel­lent time for those of us inter­ested in an inde­pen­dent foren­sic lab­o­ra­tory to get the ball rolling. There are inde­pen­dent foren­sic lab­o­ra­to­ries all over the world, two of the clos­est are in California and Texas. An in-state inde­pen­dent lab­o­ra­tory could pro­vide more cost effec­tive and timely foren­sic solu­tions than either the DPS state crime lab, or out-of-state analysis.

The ben­e­fits of inde­pen­dent labs are numer­ous. Prosecutors are no longer locked into using the police lab’s expert sim­ply because they did the orig­i­nal free analy­sis for the sub­mit­ting law enforce­ment agency. Both pros­e­cu­tors and defense attor­neys could use the same foren­sic experts. It’s far less effec­tive for a lawyer to infer the expert on the oppos­ing side is unqual­i­fied if they have paid to use that same expert on past cases. Another ben­e­fit is the lab­o­ra­tory would be truly inde­pen­dent, and there­fore more neu­tral. It’s hard to come across as a totally neu­tral foren­sic sci­en­tist if the ONLY cases you are allowed to work are cases sub­mit­ted by police for pur­poses to pros­e­cut­ing some­one crim­i­nally. Being able to work cases on both sides of the aisle would give the ana­lyst bet­ter per­spec­tive, and hope­fully reduce the pos­si­bil­ity of foren­sic exam­in­ers tak­ing on the emo­tion­ally biased mind­set that their job is to help get the “bad guy,” rather than ana­lyz­ing the evi­dence and report­ing the sci­en­tific facts.

For more infor­ma­tion about the ben­e­fits to mov­ing foren­sic labs out of police depart­ments, review my post Reforming Forensics and Breaking Up the Forensics Monopoly.