Austin police turning to DNA to solve thefts

Kudos to the City of Austin. It has been shown that aggres­sively com­bat­ing prop­erty crimes, results in a decrease in vio­lent crimes. Those peo­ple com­mit­ting prop­erty crimes even­tu­ally get caught mid-theft, and that can result in an assault or homicide.

Using DNA to link mul­ti­ple thief crime scenes enables police to appre­hend more crim­i­nals, and pros­e­cu­tors to build stronger cases. Once the crim­i­nal is put in prison, they are much less likely to be out on the street hurt­ing or killing people.

Money well spent.

Original arti­cle posted here.

Federal grants help­ing agen­cies do more testing.

By Tony Plohetski
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, November 30, 2008

A still-smoldering cig­a­rette butt at a South Austin home that had been the tar­get of a thief. A tiny drop of blood on shat­tered glass from a bur­glar­ized car. Saliva on equip­ment used to siphon gas from a fleet of indus­trial trucks.

When Austin police began try­ing to find who had car­ried out each of those recent prop­erty crimes, they stum­bled across clues that went beyond the usual fin­ger­print evi­dence that they hope for in such cases.

They found DNA.

More than a decade after DNA test­ing became one of law enforce­ment agen­cies’ best meth­ods for solv­ing vio­lent crimes such as homi­cides and sex­ual assaults, Austin police have joined only a small num­ber of other police depart­ments in the United States that use it to crack rou­tine but often difficult-to-solve prop­erty crimes.

The depart­ment is part of a national law enforce­ment move­ment to begin using DNA as evi­dence in such crimes, a prac­tice that has migrated to the United States from Great Britain.

“When we first started hear­ing about DNA, I didn’t expect it would be used on crimes like this,” said Detective Michael Sanford, who has spent the past eight years inves­ti­gat­ing mostly home and car bur­glar­ies in East Austin. “But we are always look­ing for as much evi­dence as we can get.”

Detectives say that in sev­eral of the rare instances when they col­lected DNA evi­dence at prop­erty crime scenes, it led to arrests or more clues in cases that prob­a­bly would have remained unsolved. In 2007, Austin police solved about 11 per­cent of all prop­erty crimes, which made up 92 per­cent of the city’s over­all crimes that year, accord­ing to FBI sta­tis­tics. Police say they often are hin­dered by a lack of evidence.

Police say they have sub­mit­ted DNA evi­dence from about 50 prop­erty crime scenes this year — a tiny per­cent­age of the roughly 38,000 prop­erty crimes reported — and iden­ti­fied 10 sus­pects by com­par­ing it with DNA pro­files in a national data­base of crim­i­nals. Such crimes are down about 3 per­cent from the same period last year, but police say they expect the num­ber to increase as the eco­nomic cri­sis deep­ens and unem­ploy­ment rates rise.

Although police have found DNA evi­dence in every­thing from base­ball caps to gloves and other cloth­ing left at crime scenes, they say it is too early to know how DNA evi­dence might affect con­vic­tion rates in prop­erty crime cases.

But a recent U.S. Department of Justice and Urban Institute study that pro­motes the prac­tice said author­i­ties in selected cities iden­ti­fied twice as many prop­erty crime sus­pects when offi­cers col­lected DNA. Police offi­cials in Los Angeles; Denver; Phoenix; Topeka, Kan.; and Orange County, Calif., par­tic­i­pated in the study.

John Roman, one of the authors, said that he knows of no orga­ni­za­tion that tracks the num­ber of U.S. law enforce­ment agen­cies that use DNA evi­dence to solve prop­erty crimes but that he thinks prob­a­bly fewer than 100 agen­cies among 17,000 nation­ally do so.

Experts sug­gested that one pos­si­ble rea­son is that many depart­ments are strug­gling to reduce back­logs of DNA test­ing in vio­lent crime cases.

Among major Texas cities, Austin, which opened its new crime lab in 2004 and has a small case back­log, has the only depart­ment col­lect­ing and test­ing DNA sam­ples in prop­erty crime cases.

“The peo­ple in Austin invested in what I believe to be one of the best crime labs in the nation,” Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo said last week. “We are doing every­thing we can to max­i­mize its use.”

Practice expected to become trend Barry Fisher, past pres­i­dent of the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors and direc­tor of the Los Angeles County sheriff’s depart­ment crime lab, said his agency has per­formed DNA test­ing in about 100 prop­erty crime cases, mostly involv­ing bur­glar­ies, dur­ing the past six months. In about 40 per­cent of those cases, inves­ti­ga­tors iden­ti­fied sus­pects through the national DNA data­base, which con­tains the DNA of sus­pects con­victed of crimes such as mur­der and sex­ual assault.

“What we see is that these bur­glars are in the data­base for a whole host of things,” Fisher said.

Fisher said he thinks depart­ments nation­wide will con­tinue to embrace the trend as more fed­eral grant money becomes avail­able for expanded DNA test­ing, more work­ers become trained to do the test­ing and the tests become less expen­sive. Austin police esti­mate that a DNA test costs about $2,000 and takes about 60 hours of employee labor.

“We in the U.S. still have a long way to go, and it’s not that we can’t or won’t do it,” Fisher said. “It is a mat­ter of whether or not the pub­lic and the politi­cians who fund crime labs are will­ing to foot the bill.”

Ed Harris, chief of field sup­port ser­vices for the Austin police, said the depart­ment recently received more fed­eral grant money to pay over­time to DNA ana­lysts and to pur­chase more equip­ment, includ­ing refrig­er­a­tion units, that make more test­ing possible.

Also, the depart­ment is now fully staffed with five DNA foren­sic sci­en­tists, Harris said.

In recent weeks, crime lab offi­cials have asked civil­ian work­ers and patrol offi­cers who comb crime scenes for clues to look for DNA evi­dence from prop­erty crimes and sub­mit it for test­ing. Harris said that as the lab’s work­load increases, DNA ana­lysts will con­tinue to place the high­est pri­or­ity on vio­lent crime cases.

When they get DNA data­base matches in prop­erty crime inves­ti­ga­tions, they send that infor­ma­tion to detec­tives assigned to the case.

The thefts involv­ing the cig­a­rette butt at the bur­glary scene, the gaso­line siphon­ing equip­ment and the shat­tered glass from the vehi­cle remain under investigation.

Harris said that crim­i­nals who com­mit prop­erty crimes some­times grad­u­ate to more seri­ous offenses and that prop­erty crime sus­pects are fre­quently respon­si­ble for mul­ti­ple cases, so solv­ing one can help close many more.

For vic­tims, Harris said, DNA test­ing can help them feel as though inves­ti­ga­tors are tak­ing prop­erty crimes seriously.

“Most of our cit­i­zens have come to the real­iza­tion that noth­ing is going to hap­pen” in prop­erty cases, Harris said. “It is imper­a­tive that we pro­vide some relief.”

A suc­cess story

Sharon Williamson had lit­tle hope that inves­ti­ga­tors would fig­ure out who broke into her Central East Austin house last year.

Someone crawled in after shat­ter­ing a kitchen win­dow while she was away for the night. The intruder, accused of tak­ing a lap­top com­puter and other items, left a trail of blood on her floors and walls. Officers col­lected two pieces of blood-covered glass and sent them to the crime lab for test­ing, accord­ing to an arrest affidavit.

Analysts com­pared the DNA on the glass and used it to iden­tify Sharon Elaine Davilla, 27, the affi­davit said.

Detective Sanford, who got the case, called Williamson and asked her whether she knew Davilla, the affi­davit said. When she said no, he got an arrest war­rant charg­ing Davilla with bur­glary of a habi­ta­tion, a second-degree felony for which she faced up to 20 years in prison.

“We were able to file charges only because we had DNA,” Sanford said.

Williamson said she was relieved when she learned that police had made an arrest and was some­what sur­prised that blood­stains had helped break the case.

“If they have that kind of evi­dence, they should use it,” she said. “It was pretty cool.”