Houston Chronicle on the Houston PD Crime Lab

The Houston Chronicle pub­lished a op-ed over the week­end, call­ing for change in their police crime lab. Even going as far as sug­gest­ing it’s time to close it down, and open up a regional crime lab that works with, but is inde­pen­dent of law enforce­ment agencies.

According to the audit, HPD work­ers often over­looked prints or decided wrongly that prints weren’t good enough to be ana­lyzed. Maybe the ana­lysts were rushed: After all, their unit has a 6,000-case back­log with cases dat­ing back two years — cases that include vio­lent crimes. But maybe, too, more sin­is­ter forces were afoot: HPD is con­duct­ing a crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tion that involves mis­han­dled evi­dence in the lab.

The fin­ger­print scan­dal reminds us that, shock­ingly, Houston still needs to move foren­sic inves­ti­ga­tions out of its police depart­ment. Seven years ago — seven! — we learned that HPD’s crime lab had botched thou­sands of cases. But even now, after a com­plete restruc­tur­ing, the crime lab’s prob­lems per­sist: This fall, the Chronicle found that the lab’s back­log included nearly 4,000 rape kits await­ing DNA tests — includ­ing more than 1,000 active cases. The lab is so swamped that HPD doesn’t even bother to col­lect DNA evi­dence from mere prop­erty crimes. Burglars can feel free to drop cig­a­rette butts on a victim’s car­pet: HPD doesn’t have time to test their saliva.

The police department’s never-ending prob­lems con­tinue to make the point that foren­sics labs shouldn’t be man­aged by police depart­ments — a point made ear­lier this year by no less than the National Academy of Science, in a con­gres­sion­ally man­dated report. When you put cops and sci­en­tists together, the cul­tures clash — and when the cops are in charge, the sci­ence nat­u­rally suf­fers. Too often, police depart­ments slash labs’ bud­gets below the bare min­i­mum, and hire poorly trained tech­ni­cians who exag­ger­ate results.

Whatever hap­pened to the move to build a regional foren­sics lab, one that works with all our area’s law-enforcement agen­cies, but is its own inde­pen­dent entity?

The arti­cle cor­rectly points out, that when sci­en­tific and police cul­tures clash, and when cops are in charge, the sci­ence suf­fers. But that’s a lit­tle unfair to police. It isn’t just them. It’s the same when it’s pros­e­cu­tors, defense attor­neys, or politi­cians. When sci­ence is beholden to any orga­ni­za­tion or group that has an agenda, be it catch­ing the bad guy, get­ting con­vic­tions, “get­ting some­one off”, or sup­port­ing a polit­i­cal issue (global warm­ing), sci­ence suffers.

The arti­cle also calls for inde­pen­dent crime lab­o­ra­to­ries. This is where Forensics Guy, Inc. and Forensic Analysis Consulting Services, Inc. can help. Feel free to con­tact us with ques­tions about how we can meet your inde­pen­dent foren­sic sci­ence needs. Whether you are a police agency, pros­e­cu­tor, defense attor­ney, or pri­vate cit­i­zen, we can help.