Santa Clara Crime Lab Turns to RFID

Original arti­cle posted here.

At the California facil­ity, EPC Gen 2 tags will keep tabs on evi­dence as tech­ni­cians per­form DNA typ­ing, fin­ger­print analy­sis, bal­lis­tics, tox­i­col­ogy and drug test­ing, and other procedures.

By Beth Bacheldor

Nov. 5, 2008—In a new California crime lab, pas­sive RFID tags will help dozens of pro­fes­sional crime solvers track all sorts of evidence—from DNA to com­put­ers to hand­guns to cars—as they are processed, tested and analyzed.

The $75.5 mil­lion, 90,000-square-foot build­ing, being built by the Santa Clara County gov­ern­ment, is replac­ing the county’s cur­rent crime lab. The exist­ing lab, com­posed of three sep­a­rate sites, has relied on aging bar-code and infor­ma­tion sys­tems to track and man­age approx­i­mately 35,000 to 40,000 pieces of evi­dence annually.

The new facil­ity include not only a fir­ing range, a clean room for com­puter foren­sics and tools for ana­lyz­ing mito­chon­dr­ial DNA, but also an EPC Gen 2 RFID sys­tem con­sist­ing of Alien Technology’s Squiggle RFID tags, to be affixed to evi­dence, and seven Alien ALR-9650 RFID inter­roga­tors posi­tioned within the prop­erty room, on each of the lab’s four floors, as well as near ele­va­tor doors on the sec­ond, third and fourth floors. All evi­dence that enters the build­ing gets logged in at the first-floor prop­erty room, then remains in that loca­tion until requested by staff on the upper floors.

Property offi­cers move the evi­dence to an upper-level prop­erty room, and read­ers at the ele­va­tors doc­u­ment that move­ment. When lab tech­ni­cians in an upper-level prop­erty room check evi­dence in or out, the room’s RFID reader doc­u­ments that action. The lab will employ two mod­els of RFID tags, which can with­stand the freez­ing tem­per­a­tures of cold stor­age: a smaller tag (the ALN-9540 Squiggle) for evi­dence such as blood vials, and a larger model (the ALN-9562 Squiggle-SH) for con­tain­ers or plas­tic bags hold­ing all other evidence.

Until now, the lab’s staff has attached an adhe­sive paper label—printed with a unique bar-coded iden­ti­fi­ca­tion number—to a bag or con­tainer hold­ing each piece of evi­dence. The crime lab expects that the RFID sys­tem will make it eas­ier to locate evi­dence as it is being processed, and also pro­vide a more thor­ough doc­u­men­ta­tion of each item’s chain of custody.

“The bar-code sys­tem has worked well for us,” says Benny Del Re, direc­tor of the Santa Clara Crime Lab. But Del Re notes that bar-coding was prone to errors. In some instances, for exam­ple, when evi­dence was checked out for test­ing, employ­ees would for­get to man­u­ally scan the bar code to doc­u­ment that move­ment. “We are just try­ing to find a way of speed­ing up our process from admit­ting evi­dence to track­ing that evi­dence,” he says. “With RFID, we are tak­ing things to the next level.”

The lab has been work­ing with sys­tem inte­gra­tor Ciber to develop the pas­sive RFID evidence-tracking sys­tem. The inte­gra­tor has also designed a new Web-based Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS), which the lab uti­lizes to doc­u­ment and man­age all of the evi­dence. When evi­dence is checked in for pro­cess­ing, an RFID tag is affixed to that item, the unique ID num­ber of which is cap­tured and cor­re­lated with spe­cific infor­ma­tion regard­ing the evi­dence, includ­ing the name of the agency that sub­mit­ted it, and when it was received.

In addi­tion, a bar code will be affixed to the evi­dence that includes a case num­ber for that par­tic­u­lar item (one case num­ber might rep­re­sent numer­ous pieces of evi­dence, but each item has a unique iden­ti­fier via the RFID tag). Derivative pieces will also get their own RFID tags. A DNA swab taken of a gun’s sur­face, for exam­ple, will be fit­ted with an RFID tag, as well as a bar-code label printed with the same case num­ber as the gun’s.

Whenever a crim­i­nol­o­gist removes a piece of evi­dence from a prop­erty room, the RFID inter­roga­tor auto­mat­i­cally cap­tures the unique ID num­ber, and a nearby wall-mounted com­puter pulls up the evi­dence in LIMS. The crim­i­nol­o­gist uses a bar-code reader to scan his or her ID badge (which has a bar-coded num­ber that iden­ti­fies that indi­vid­ual) and enters in any per­ti­nent infor­ma­tion. If an employee fails to scan the bar code on his or her badge, Del Re says, the ter­mi­nal will sound an alarm and LIMS will record that no worker ID badge num­ber was cap­tured. The same process is repeated when the employee returns the evi­dence to the prop­erty room.

According to Del Re, the lab plans to make LIMS avail­able to local law enforce­ment agen­cies so they can check the sta­tus of evi­dence. In addi­tion, the agen­cies can enter basic infor­ma­tion about evi­dence before bring­ing it to the lab where it is received. At some point, local agen­cies may be pro­vided with RFID tags to affix to the items ahead of time.

The RFID sys­tem is expected to go live in the next month, though the lab will con­tinue to use the bar-code labels for the fore­see­able future. “The bar codes add some redun­dancy,” Del Re says. “But as time goes on, as we become more com­fort­able with RFID tags, we may find that we don’t need bar-coding. For right now, though, it’s for our peace of mind.”