Institutional Bias Examined

Recently the NAS report described how insti­tu­tional bias should be avoided by hav­ing crime labs removed from police/prosecutor’s agen­cies. The arti­cle quoted below ran in PoliceOne.com, and talks about how police offi­cers can con­tribute to bias in foren­sic examination.

A police offi­cer rushes up to the fin­ger­print exam­iner and pleads for help.

The sus­pect sit­ting in the inter­ro­ga­tion room is as guilty as can be, the offi­cer insists, and a con­firmed fin­ger­print match would surely bring about a confession.

Not exactly the envi­ron­ment to pro­duce an unbi­ased examination.

But nei­ther is it far-fetched in the some­times boil­ing cli­mate of crime-fighting. Police offi­cers want arrests to stick, they want to get crim­i­nals off the street, and if the sys­tem allows them such access to the key proces­sors of infor­ma­tion, well, some offi­cers will take advantage.

“They put pres­sure on you shame­lessly,” Pat Wertheim, a long­time fin­ger­print exam­iner, said. “I’ve felt it. ”

But not at his present job, Wertheim said, nor would it hap­pen at any lab accred­ited by the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors. These days, he said, such pres­sure likely would occur in small police agencies.

Wertheim works for the Arizona Department of Public Safety, and he said that in his lab, police pres­sure is impos­si­ble. “We have an imper­vi­ous fire­wall,” Wertheim said. Police offi­cers “can’t get past the secretary. ”

Wertheim, empha­siz­ing that he is speak­ing for him­self and not the agency he works for, rec­om­mends that defense attor­neys find out what the exam­iner knew and when the exam­iner knew it.

“A good line of ques­tion­ing [of an exam­iner] would be, ‘Do the police have access to the lab? Do you lis­ten to the police inves­ti­ga­tor before you do your exam? If the offi­cer said he had an eye­wit­ness, were you aware of that before you did the examination?’”

I have to take excep­tion to Mr. Wetheim’s opin­ion that it’s impos­si­ble to feel pres­sure while work­ing for an ASCLD accred­ited lab­o­ra­tory. I’ve felt such pres­sure while work­ing in an accred­ited lab­o­ra­tory, and seen it’s applied to other foren­sic examiners.

One time I was re-analyze evi­dence I had pre­vi­ously exam­ined and change my opin­ion from “incon­clu­sive” to “con­clu­sive”, or the local pros­e­cu­tor wouldn’t go for­ward with the case.

Another time rank­ing mem­bers of a local pros­e­cut­ing agency, once again not happy with an “incon­clu­sive” result, back-doored my by per­son­ally call­ing another exam­iner in the lab I worked in to have them re-analyze the evidence.

One time I was sit­ting in on a meet­ing with lab­o­ra­tory “brass”, where the sworn lab­o­ra­tory com­man­der had ten­ta­tively agreed to re-analyze all latent print analy­sis per­formed at another crime lab in the area, because a local pros­e­cut­ing agency had “lost faith” in the other agency’s laboratory.

One exam­iner where I worked gave opin­ion that the police involved in the case didn’t like. They responded by accus­ing him of not being part of the “police brotherhood”.

Now in none of the cases I men­tioned above did the exam­iner “cave” into exter­nal expec­ta­tions. And in only one case above did an exam­iner face dis­ci­pli­nary actions for not “meet­ing expec­ta­tions”. Regardless, depend­ing on the indi­vid­ual there are exter­nal pres­sures to con­form to expec­ta­tions. It’s depends on the intesti­nal for­ti­tude of that indi­vid­ual to stick to the sci­en­tific truth of the mat­ter. And truth be told. those indi­vid­u­als who do seem to rou­tinely give opin­ions and results that are inline with what the agency in charge desires, seem to be dis­pro­por­tion­ately pro­moted more rapidly than those exam­in­ers who “play it straight”.

Read the whole PoliceOne.com arti­cle here.