Amazingly Michigan plans on diverting funds from the State Crime Lab to inspect buses. Didn’t they learn what happens to a poorly funded/run crime lab when the Detroit Police Department Crime Lab was shut down?
A plan to fund school bus inspections with $900,000 from the state police crime lab budget is “like robbing Peter to pay Paul,” Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard says.
While it may protect children, it also subjects them and others to criminals who might otherwise be indentified if not for backlogs at the state labs, he said.
A proposal from State Budget Director Robert Emerson is expected to go before a House appropriations committee for approval today and after that, on to the State Senate. The recommendation calls for $900,000 to be transferred from the State Police Forensic Labs and another $500,000 from the Capital Security Guards assigned to the State Capitol.
“It’s like asking you which arm do you want? Your right or your left?” said Bouchard, a Republican candidate for governor. “Of course we want children riding school buses to be protected but, why does it have to be at the expense of something as important as the crime labs?”
Read the complete Detroit News story here.
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What’s next? Stopping the pay for correction officers to care for the elderly? I understand that people these days need to do more with less, but this should scream a klaxon of alarm bells both fiscal and forensic. With less funding any forensic backlog will now increase which will create pressure on technicians to hurry. Hurry=make mistakes. Make enough mistakes, it becomes systemic and you wake up with the Huston crime lab type of situation. Also, fiscally, if a technician is rushed and does the job wrong, then a possible innocent person goes to jail for some prolonged period of time being a net fiscal drag on the system.