Phoenix Police Investigate Phoenix Crime Lab

Criminal defense attor­neys are going to love this.  Anytime you have a sit­u­a­tion where evi­dence is mis­han­dled, it ques­tions the reli­a­bil­ity of foren­sic test results.  Apparently the Phoenix Police Department is inves­ti­gat­ing claims that crime lab staff left evi­dence behind at crime scenes, and threw away fin­ger­print evidence.

PHOENIX — CBS 5 News obtained sworn affi­davits by Phoenix police crime lab tech­ni­cians accus­ing their co-workers of com­mit­ting errors that could botch inves­ti­ga­tions, includ­ing leav­ing evi­dence behind at scenes and dis­pos­ing of fin­ger­print evidence.

The state­ments were made in attempts to prove that lab employ­ees are treated dif­fer­ently, depend­ing on whether or not they’re union mem­bers or not.

“Some non-union employ­ees have done things that could botch inves­ti­ga­tions, but noth­ing hap­pens to them. Yet union mem­bers are crit­i­cized for rel­a­tively minor things,” said AFSCME Union spokesper­son Frank Piccioli.

Piccioli believes the inter­nal dis­putes are tear­ing the lab apart and wast­ing pub­lic resources.

Read the Phoenix KPHO CBS local affil­i­ate arti­cle.

Interestingly it seems this is a case of inter­nal whis­tle blow­ers com­plain­ing of unfair treat­ment based on some kind of  “employee clas­si­fi­ca­tion.”  As employ­ees of a police crime lab, the crime lab staff should be used to this.  One of the biggest prob­lems work­ing for crime labs in Arizona, is the fact that there is a a class sys­tem.  There are the pre­ferred employ­ees (sworn police offi­cers), and the sec­ond class employ­ees (civil­ian police depart­ment employ­ees).  This isn’t the case in all police crime labs, but it is cer­tainly the case in many police crime labs in Arizona.

Regardless of how this inves­ti­ga­tion turns out, you can be cer­tain that the Phoenix Police Department will dis­close the results of the inves­ti­ga­tion.  As an orga­ni­za­tion, his­tor­i­cally Phoenix PD has always been pretty forth­com­ing with the results of inves­ti­ga­tions into prob­lems with their crime lab.

I was actu­ally the sub­ject of an “unof­fi­cial inves­ti­ga­tion” at the Phoenix Crime Lab.  “Unofficial” in that as an accred­ited police depart­ment, the Phoenix police depart­ment knows they have to notify an employee if they are the sub­ject of an inter­nal inves­ti­ga­tion (referred to as an NOI “notice of investigation”).

What hap­pened in my case was I was given a pro­fi­ciency test to per­form a Kastle-Meyer pre­sump­tive blood test.  I worked in the firearms sec­tion of the lab­o­ra­tory, but we still had to be pro­fi­ciency tested.  In order to save money, the lab­o­ra­tory had the DNA sec­tion make up these pro­fi­ciency tests inter­nally for the firearms sec­tion.  Everything was fine until I reported suede test sam­ple as being “pos­i­tive” for blood, when the answer key said it should be “negative.”

I received a memo from the qual­ity man­ager noti­fy­ing me of my “defi­ciency.”  I replied back basi­cally say­ing they were wrong, and that the the sam­ple did test pos­i­tive for blood.  Seriously.  This type of test is brain­less.  I could have kinder­garten­ers trained to do it in 10 minutes.

So the qual­ity man­ager returned the pro­fi­ciency test to me, still in the sealed con­di­tion I returned it to them.  We sat and watched as I re-did the exam­i­na­tion on the ques­tioned pro­fi­ciency item.  A pos­i­tive result was obtained again.  The qual­ity man­ager said thank you, that’s all I needed to see.

Case closed right?  Wrong.  The next step was the qual­ity man­ager took the pro­fi­ciency test to the DNA sec­tion to have an ana­lyst re-test the entire test.  They got the same results I did, once again indi­cat­ing the answer key they had was wrong.

Case closed right?  Wrong.  Instead of mak­ing the log­i­cal con­clu­sion that one of dozens of items pre­pared inter­nally for the pro­fi­ciency test was writ­ten down incor­rectly on the answer key, the lab man­age­ment thinks I pulled a Captain Kirk “Kobayashi Maru” maneu­ver and “planted” the blood.  So to inves­ti­gate, they per­formed DNA analy­sis on the pro­fi­ciency test sam­ple.  Now police can’t get the DNA lab to ana­lyze every­thing for DNA that they want to inves­ti­gate crimes in Phoenix, but here is a case where the DNA lab can’t accept they made a mis­take mak­ing up a pro­fi­ciency test answer key, so they per­form DNA analy­sis to see if I “planted” blood on the sam­ple, and if so, who’s blood.

Does any­one else see the prob­lem with the logic there?  They think I have the time or inter­est in try­ing to trick another sec­tion of the crime lab, so I know­ingly add blood to a “neg­a­tive” pro­fi­ciency sam­ple just to mess with them?  The results of the DNA test were “bovine DNA.”  Imagine that.  Cow DNA from a piece of suede.

The end result was not “good job” for catch­ing our mis­take of course.  It was a memo that said, “Unexpected Results,” instead of, “Passing Results.”  So after ALL that, I had to do a sec­ond pro­fi­ciency test.  You can bet I had some­one else watch me per­form every step of that test from start to finish.