Funding sought for DPS crime lab

The solu­tion to the state crime lab’s bud­get deficit? Send the bill to speed­ers and drunk-drivers. There isn’t a con­flict of inter­est in pros­e­cu­tors and police sci­en­tists directly ben­e­fit­ing from guilty DUI ver­dicts, and speed­ing is there? Well there will be if the leg­is­la­ture gets it’s way.

In sum­mary, in order to keep their jobs, the state crime lab will have to be sure that as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble are found guilty as fine and penal­ties are rolled back to the lab as a fund­ing source.

Original arti­cle posted here.

The state Department of Public Safety crime lab is run­ning out of money, and unless leg­is­la­tors can come up with a new fund­ing source, coun­ties and cities may have to foot the $10 mil­lion bill to oper­ate the lab next year.

It’s a prospect that has loomed large for local police chiefs and county sher­iffs and pros­e­cu­tors since last sum­mer, but with the state’s bud­get cri­sis deep­en­ing and city and county gov­ern­ments con­tin­u­ing to make cuts, the sit­u­a­tion is increas­ingly dire, a group of law-enforcement offi­cials told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday afternoon.

Sen. Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, pro­posed a solu­tion that could cre­ate a ded­i­cated fund­ing source for the lab: add a sur­charge of up to 47 per­cent for dri­vers to attend defensive-driving school and take some money out of a drunk-driving abate­ment fund.

People pay sur­charges on many other fees and fines, such as traf­fic tick­ets, but not on defensive-driving-school fees, which Pearce termed a loophole.

“It’s a mat­ter of pri­or­i­ties,” said Pearce, who also is chair­man of the Senate Appropriations Committee. “These are tough times, but this is a priority.”

That idea pleased law-enforcement offi­cials, who came from around the state to push for a ded­i­cated fund­ing source for the lab, which processed more than 50,000 pieces of evi­dence in 2008, includ­ing con­duct­ing tox­i­col­ogy tests, run­ning DNA pro­files and ana­lyz­ing fin­ger­prints, among other duties.

Sen. Ken Cheuvront, D-Phoenix, said Pearce’s pro­posal amounted to account­ing gim­micks to real­lo­cate money, but added that the lab would get funded.

“We all real­ize why they’re impor­tant, it’s just who is going to pay for it: Whether it’s the cities or the state,” Cheuvront said.

Legislators are work­ing on the fis­cal 2010 bud­get, which includes a short­fall as large as $3.5 bil­lion, but they have yet to unveil a draft.

Police chiefs and pros­e­cu­tors faced the same fate last year, when DPS said that it would charge other agen­cies up to $7.8 mil­lion for lab fees. Officials were able to come up with about $5 mil­lion in grant fund­ing to cover those costs, leav­ing local agen­cies to cover the remainder.

A hand­ful of local agen­cies have con­tributed about $9,000 toward that total, leav­ing open the pos­si­bil­ity that the DPS lab will have to cur­tail its oper­a­tions if the money runs out before the end of the fis­cal year.

“We’re still try­ing to fig­ure that out,” said Todd Griffith, super­in­ten­dent of the agency’s crime lab.