Tuscon PD crime lab addresses concerns, is reaccredited

By Alexis Huicochea
ARIZONA DAILY STAR
The Tucson Police Department’s crime lab has been re-accredited after it was ruled non-compliant on a num­ber of issues ear­lier this year.
The American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors said in a let­ter to the depart-ment on Wednesday that the crime lab meets or exceeds national stan­dards and is accred­ited in the dis­ci­plines of con­trolled sub­stances, tox­i­col­ogy for blood alco­hol, trace evi­dence for fire debris and explo­sives, biol­ogy, firearms, latent-print com­par­isons, and com­puter foren­sics.
The depart­ment had until December to cor­rect 14 issues iden­ti­fied by the crime lab director’s accred­i­ta­tion board, most of which were a mat­ter of hav­ing proper doc­u­men­ta­tion rather than any­thing that would com­pro­mise an inves­ti­ga­tion, Vicky Bode, the lab’s qual­ity assur­ance man­ager, said at the time. The depart­ment never lost accred­i­ta­tion while it worked to cor­rect prob­lems that were noted dur­ing an inspec­tion in January.
Some of the issues included:
● Maintenance and cal­i­bra­tion were not being per­formed on some equip­ment as required.
● A piece of evi­dence being exam­ined for fin­ger­prints had been stored unsealed in the lab­o­ra­tory evi­dence room for more than a year. As a result, the lab had to insti­tute a two-year cap on how long evi­dence can be con­sid­ered to be in the process of exam­i­na­tion because there was not a spe­cific time period before.
● There were three doc­u­mented cases in which a latent-print trainee con­t­a­m­i­nated evi­dence with the trainee’s DNA.
A num­ber of the vio­la­tions were from pro­ce­dures not being prop­erly noted in man­u­als.
Being involved in the accred­i­ta­tion process is vol­un­tary and demon­strates that lab man­age­ment, per­son­nel, oper­a­tional and tech­ni­cal pro­ce­dures, equip­ment and facil­i­ties meet estab­lished standards.