City must get LAPD crime-lab mess fixed

This opin­ion arti­cle below is a lit­tle heavy-handed on the crime lab itself, but the fact remains that crime lab after crime lab are being tasked to ana­lyze an expo­nen­tially grow­ing num­ber of items of evidence.

The num­ber of cases increase, and the num­ber of items per case increase. This is as a result of the crime lab’s own excel­lent past per­for­mance, increased aware­ness by police offi­cers of what foren­sic tests can be per­formed, and the pros­e­cu­tors’ and/or public’s unre­al­is­tic expec­ta­tions based on pop­u­lar TV fiction.

The sim­ple fact is that crime labs can not keep up with demand. Analysts are expected to crank out more “wid­gets” (ana­lyz­ing sam­ples quicker) than ever before. At some point the amount expected sur­passes an indi­vid­ual analyst’s abil­ity. The end result is either the ana­lyst refus­ing to do more work, and risk dis­ci­pli­nary action, or cut­ting cor­ners and run the risk of erro­neous results.

The hard­est part is find­ing the cor­rect solu­tion. The lab can only process so much per ana­lyst. More ana­lysts and equip­ment cost a lot of money. Hiring new ana­lysts is a dou­ble whammy. It takes a period of time (some­times years) to get an ana­lyst fully trained, and it takes a senior ana­lyst off case work to train the new employee. The imme­di­ate result of new ana­lysts is a reduc­tion of lab out­put, as opposed to an increase.

So throw­ing more money at a crime lab isn’t the solu­tion to the prob­lem. More ana­lysts must be hired, but the agency in charge of the crime lab must also send sam­ples out to pri­vate labs to help with the back­log, until the newly trained ana­lysts can help tak­ing on the backlog.

The cit­i­zens who expect every foren­sic test to be per­formed on every piece of evi­dence, must be ready to pay the high cost asso­ci­ated through higher taxes.

Original arti­cle posted here.

City must get LAPD crime-lab mess fixed

By Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Article Last Updated: 10/21/2008 06:38:30 PM PDT

First the LAPD got caught with the dis­clo­sure that dozens, maybe hun­dreds, of peo­ple may have been falsely con­victed because of shoddy, incom­pe­tent or flat-out neg­li­gent work by foren­sic lab testers.

Now there’s the rev­e­la­tion that thou­sands of Los Angeles Police Department rape kits haven’t been tested. This out­rage may have resulted in untold hun­dreds of rape sus­pects roam­ing the streets with the chance of iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and pros­e­cu­tion get­ting more and more remote.

The LAPD has taken the heat for the lab fail­ure. But city offi­cials should take heat for it, too. Yet one wouldn’t know that they did any­thing wrong, lis­ten­ing to the loud and indig­nant yelps from City Controller Laura Chick or City Councilman Jack Weiss. They roundly con­demned LAPD offi­cials for the crime lab breakdown.

Chick, Weiss, the City Council and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, how­ever, would have to be barely one step past comatose not to know that the LAPD crime lab, like other crime labs around the coun­try, has been under with­er­ing fire the last cou­ple of years for slip­shod, ama­teur­ish, even neg­li­gent foren­sic work.

At last count, crime labs in 17 states, includ­ing the FBI crime lab, have been fin­gered for such things as fin­ger­print­ing errors, faulty blood analy­sis, flawed hair com­par­isons, and evi­dence con­t­a­m­i­na­tion. In nearly every case, lousy foren­sic work came to light after a whistle-blower, a legal group or groups of pris­on­ers pub­licly charged the labs with evi­dence bungling. The crime-lab melt­downs resulted in judges toss­ing out the cases of hun­dreds of sus­pects, and the exon­er­a­tion of dozens of con­victed pris­on­ers, some of whom came within a hair­breadth of execution.

The crime-lab scan­dals touched off a scram­ble by state and local offi­cials and police chiefs to clean up foren­sic test­ing. FBI offi­cials, for instance, fired sev­eral lab offi­cials, pros­e­cuted a lab ana­lyst for lying, and imple­mented new pro­to­cols and pro­ce­dures for han­dling evi­dence. L.A. city offi­cials could have taken the same quick action.

But they did nothing.

Even as sus­pi­cions mounted that the LAPD crime lab was badly fum­bling the ball on foren­sic work, city offi­cials daw­dled. Police Chief William Bratton’s pleas for more funds to hire and train more ana­lysts to deal with the fin­ger­print­ing errors fell on deaf ears.

In the case of the dump­ing of thou­sands of rape kits, the LAPD did receive nearly $4 mil­lion in grants specif­i­cally to clean up the back­log of untested evi­dence. Yet the prob­lem still remained.

That raises this obvi­ous ques­tion: If the money was there for rape-kit test­ing, and Bratton had made a plea for more money for the fin­ger­print test­ing, why didn’t city offi­cials order the depart­ment to spend the money and get the ball mov­ing on testing?

That’s a ques­tion that is still unan­swered. There’s no ques­tion, though, that the foot-dragging will mean law­suits for allow­ing more bad guys to run the streets, and caus­ing pain and anguish for the hun­dreds of rape and crime vic­tims as well as those falsely accused and even con­victed of crimes.

Ultimately, the biggest casu­alty of the crime-lab scan­dal is the LAPD — or more exactly, the LAPD’s image.

The fail­ure comes at a time when the depart­ment has earned high marks for doing much to cut crime in the city to near-record lows and as it has turned a hard cor­ner on bring real reform to the department.

A flawed and failed LAPD crime lab won’t can­cel these accom­plish­ments. It just means that city offi­cials and the LAPD brass have another big job — mak­ing the crime lab a top-flight, pro­fes­sional operation.

That means spend­ing the money to hire and train the best per­son­nel pos­si­ble, put iron­clad quality-control pro­ce­dures and pro­to­cols for test­ing in place, and maybe even roll a few heads in the process.

It doesn’t mean media grand­stand­ing, pos­tur­ing and feigned self-righteous indig­na­tion. That, like a shoddy crime lab, solves nothing.