Joint City-County Emergency DNA Lab for Houston PD?

It appears Houston PD is hav­ing a hard time catch­ing up with their DNA back­log. The plans for a regional crime lab will likely meet the needs of the com­mu­nity, but that’s still a ways off. A pos­si­ble solu­tion is a tem­po­rary joint city-county crime lab, so han­dle the grow­ing back­log of DNA cases (includ­ing over 4000 rape kits going back to 1996).

Let’s wish the cit­i­zens of Houston the best of luck. In many instances, multi-jurisdictional labs don’t do well, unless they are directly under the con­trol of one agency, or their own inde­pen­dent lab.

Despite spend­ing mil­lions rebuild­ing the Houston Police Department’s trou­bled DNA lab, the depart­ment still can­not keep up with daily requests to test evi­dence gath­ered at crime scenes.

In addi­tion, the lab still has a back­log of 4,076 untested rape kits dat­ing to 1996, as well as 969 newer crim­i­nal cases await­ing DNA testing.

Citing the back­log, which she says grows by 75 cases a month, Harris County District Attorney Pat Lykos has called for the estab­lish­ment of an emer­gency city-county DNA lab to dis­pose of thou­sands of untested cases. A tem­po­rary lab, which some offi­cials say could be out­fit­ted in vacant labs at the Texas Medical Center for $1.3 mil­lion, would meet local needs until the con­struc­tion of a regional crime lab that is part of Harris County’s long-range plans.

The city’s finan­cial woes, how­ever, have made Mayor Annise Parker and HPD lead­er­ship cau­tious about a foren­sic part­ner­ship, and the project was not included in HPD’s $666 mil­lion bud­get approved ear­lier this month.

“My goal is to roll as many of these foren­sic appli­ca­tions as pos­si­ble out of the con­trol of the police depart­ment” and into an inde­pen­dent crime lab, Parker said recently. But she added a caveat: “This is not a good econ­omy to be launch­ing new ini­tia­tives that cost more money. On the other hand, we really can’t put a price on jus­tice, and these kind of cleanup oper­a­tions have proved to be extremely expen­sive to the city of Houston.”

Last month, Lykos won a com­mit­ment from Harris County Commissioners Court to develop a plan for a tem­po­rary DNA lab by mid-September.

“I can­not over­state the vital impor­tance and neces­sity of the court to autho­rize the bud­get office to imme­di­ately pro­ceed,” Lykos said. “The sci­en­tific tools exist to iden­tify, appre­hend and suc­cess­fully pros­e­cute dan­ger­ous crim­i­nals and pre­vent wrong­ful con­vic­tions. And we don’t have them.“
Hiring more analysts

For now, HPD will con­tinue to process new cases by hir­ing more ana­lysts and buy­ing auto­mated equip­ment to upgrade its DNA lab on the 26^th floor of the down­town police head­quar­ters. To deal with the rape kit back­log, the depart­ment last month applied for a $1.1 mil­lion fed­eral grant to hire 10 tem­po­rary crim­i­nol­o­gists to process 2,400 of the 4,076 kits.

Dr. Laura Gahn, direc­tor of the police DNA lab, con­firmed the lab is not keep­ing abreast of new cases but said that goal will be met with new test­ing equip­ment and the hir­ing of a final staff member.

“Once we have all of the staffing and all of the equip­ment that we are cur­rently bring­ing on board, and we have the money … we will have a (test­ing) capac­ity in excess of the cases com­ing in,“ said Gahn, who could not say when that would occur.

Local and statewide experts, even a for­mer Houston police chief, insist HPD should get out of the foren­sic test­ing busi­ness alto­gether, not­ing that back­logs exist not only in DNA but also in the bal­lis­tics and fin­ger­prints divisions.

“At a bare min­i­mum, the whole process of foren­sic test­ing — old cases or new cases — has to be removed over to some respon­si­ble entity and, given the track record of HPD, they’re not the ones to do this,” said Jeff Blackburn, gen­eral coun­sel for the Innocence Project of Texas. “They just can’t clean this up.”

Read more infor­ma­tion regard­ing the plans for the HPD crime lab in the Houston Chronicle.