I’ve been to the LAPD-LASD crime laboratory and it’s a fantastic facility. Certainly tax dollars spent to investigate crimes, and potentially get violent offenders off the streets before they can commit additional victims, is an excellent plan.
The question is are dropping more and more tax dollars into police controlled crime labs the most efficient way to accomplish these tasks. There is a law of diminishing returns in economics. As government police labs grow larger and larger, they get burdened with overhead and non-case working staff, the amount of cases worked per tax dollar spent declines.
Also as indicated in the recent NAS (National Academy of Science) report on forensics, there appears to be an institutional bias in some police crime labs. Wouldn’t the public be served better if their tax dollars were spent on smaller, perhaps private, labs that are more efficient in their case work, spending less money on required layers of government bureaucracy?
I don’t know that this is the case at either LAPD or LASD crime labs, but in today’s troubled economy, especially troubled California, it might be time to start thinking outside the box, and finding better, more efficient ways to spend tax dollars.
Original article posted here:
For thousands of rape victims and their families, their anguish was compounded recently when Sheriff Lee Baca announced he no longer had the staff nor the dollars to examine DNA evidence of open cases.
Frustrating for victims, yes. Worse, scary for the county population knowing that the budgetary snafu meant rapists and other sexual offenders would remain out there, free to commit more crimes and never to feel the cold steel of police handcuffs on their wrists nor see the inside of a courtroom.
Then, last week, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Pasadena, said he was able to funnel $1 million in federal stimulus money to help the sheriff and the Los Angeles Police Department — which share a crime lab — tackle the thousands of sexual assault kits that remain unopened.
The sheriff’s department reported last month that it had 4,000 rape kits sitting in warehouses, and that was after the sheriff had launched an effort to reduce the backlog back in November.
The money — a prudent use of federal dollars and one that will create jobs as well as restart the wheels of justice — will go to Cal State Los Angeles, which oversees the 2-year-old, on-campus, joint LAPD-LASD crime lab through the California Forensic Science Institute.
The university and the lab will use the dollars, scheduled to arrive in September, to outsource about 250 of the highest-priority cases to private, accredited labs. Also, four graduate assistants studying criminalistics at CSULA will be hired to sort through the legal cases and untangle the red tape associated with each cold case. Currently, criminologists with the LAPD and LASD are making these phone calls and reading through these files, when their expertise can be better used analyzing the DNA samples themselves. Last, CSULA professors will be given time to research new and faster ways to analyze crime evidence and present their findings to the public.
Unlike an episode of “CSI,” even the relatively new crime lab on the CSULA campus can’t turn around cases within a few minutes. Some of the evidence is tainted with other bodily fluids or present other scientific challenges which adds to the time it takes to complete an investigation. The trail on other cases have become so cold that analyzing DNA data is not enough to bring a rapist to justice.
Hence, the joint agency crime lab, which itself took years to build and staff, is not the end of the line for families and victims awaiting justice. The backlog that has been built up must be addressed quickly, before the assailant strikes again. Even the $1 million is not enough to do so — that will take another $3 million or $4 million, experts estimate.
Money spent on solving crime cases is money well spent. More importantly, our justice system can’t be let to rot while the state suffers through a deep recession. The country is built on a working criminal justice system. That takes money, people, equipment, training, etc. But as long as this money is spent wisely and not wasted, that is tax dollars that are well spent. Something we believe will be the case come September at the CSULA crime lab.
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