on June 23, 2010 by Amy Driver in Forensic Reform, Legislation, NAS Report, Comments (1)
NAS Recommendation 4: Take Crime Labs Away From Cops
The fourth recommendation from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report titled “Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward” is generally seen as the most unrealistic: make all crime labs independent of state and local law enforcement and prosecutor’s offices through federal funding. I have to admit that my first reaction to this was, “That’s not possible.”
The discussion of this recommendation in the NAS report is brief, but the intent is clear and consistent with much of the rest of the report: work to eliminate bias in forensic science, work to allow equal access to resources to all stakeholders in the criminal justice system, and ensure that the science is speaking for the evidence, not for whoever is pulling the purse strings. However, implementation of this recommendation is not realistic given practical and political implications. But there may be alternatives to deliver the intended results.
The Practical Hurdles To Implementation
My first thoughts of the impossibility of disengaging crime labs from law enforcement were of my days of responding to officer involved shootings at the Los Angeles Police Department. Working under a federal consent decree, the LAPD was forced to come up with a new way to handle their officer involved shootings (OIS’s).
The system the LAPD came up with (and which works very well) has two teams of detectives, an Administrative (Admin) side and a Criminal (Crim) side, investigating all officer involved shootings, along with the Firearms Analysis Unit from the crime lab. The Admin detectives investigate OIS’s to see if the officers followed department policy when they decided to fire their weapons. The Crim detectives investigate the OIS’s strictly as a regular ol’ shooting to determine if the officers committed a crime when they fired their weapons.
The biggest difference between Admin and Crim detectives is that Admin detectives have the ability to revoke the 5th Amendment rights of a police officer who has been involved in an OIS. Any statement that officer makes after their 5th Amendment rights have been revoked is called a Compelled Statement and cannot be used in the criminal investigation so the Crim detectives don’t have access to them. As a member of the investigative team, I had access to those Compelled Statements as a necessary part of my investigation. There is no way the LAPD or any other law enforcement agency would turn over those Compelled Statements to an outside agency, nor should they. They had to revoke someone’s constitutional rights to get that information. That information should be guarded with the utmost care.
There are many other considerations as well. The analysis of evidence often involves the destruction of some or all of the evidence sample. Allowing that to be done by an outside entity would be a liability nightmare for law enforcement agencies. Current rules and regulations on the transfer of evidence to outside entities means that backlogs would grow. Also, a lot of information in criminal investigations is confidential, such as the names of rape victims. There would probably have to be changes in state and federal laws to allow for the sharing of information and the transfer of evidence for examination.
Other hurdles to implementing this system are determining how to establish who gets a crime lab and how many employees they get and what those employees are trained to do. Do you base it on population density? Does Montana get 5 crime lab employees who can do everything a crime lab needs to do for every 200 square miles but Los Angeles gets 1,000 crime lab employees, each specializing in a specific area of forensic science? How many DNA sequencers and GC-Mass Specs (very expensive but necessary equipment) do you put in Idaho versus New York? What about meth lab crews? You might have 10 meth labs in rural county but none in major cities. There are a lot of details, legal and logistical, that would take years to work out assuming you could get everyone on the same page.
The Political Hurdles To Implementation
Two words: Tea Party. And they’ll have three words: Nationalized Criminal Prosecution. It does not make sense, but you cannot remove an idea by logic which was not placed there by logic. See my post on the first NAS Recommendation to create the National Institute of Forensic Science (NIFS).
Alternatives to This Recommendation
The intent of this recommendation is admirable can be fulfilled through appropriate training, transparency, and oversight which can be accomplished by proper accreditation and certification processes. The NAS Committee made a whole slew of recommendations around accreditation and certification that I’ll be talking about next week.
See all NAS posts.
Tags: Forensic Reform, Legislation, NAS Report
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Paul R Laska
June 23, 2010 @ 9:40 am
The NAS findings are so orly considered. Place the criminalistic community under federal control. Not that the feds have any better history than local agencies…vis a vis Brandon Mayfield, the FBI’s bullet-lead “tracing” program, and other failures. As you allude to, the needs of Idaho are different from Iowa are different from LA are different from NYC. While no government operation is either operationally or fiscally efficient, the more local the control, the more likely it is to be.
Other aspects of the NAS are just as poorly thought out. For example, uniformity in terminology. On paper it sounds good. So does plain talk for radio transmissions. And plain talk on the radio…isn’t! IN California, a Tanker is a big plane that bombs fires with water; in Florida it is a big truck that hauls water to a scene to supply fire trucks. Engine, truck, pumper are the same, but different. Is it a crash, a wreck, a collision, a TC or an MVA? The same applies to forensics. I am old school, I say identification; new school may say individualize. As long as I know that individualize and identify mean the same, let me use my word, and you use yours. As a writer, the English language would get very boring if I could not use a wide variety of substitute words to phrase my sentences, and indeed to give different meaning to my statements by their use. If we are entering a period of time where practitioners do not have the depth of vocabulary, perhaps that points to a much more serious problem that we are avoiding…
I entered the field over 35 years ago – not with a lab, but in the identification section of a small police department. I was taught one basic rule, which guided my career, and that of most of my peers – that my duty was to the evidence, not to the case, not to the detective, not to the prosecution. That was THE ethic. I know peers who suffered in their careers for keeping the ethic, but kept it they did, and held their heads up through their careers for that reason. Sworn or civilian, ID, CSI or lab, it was accepted as the rule, and the guiding force.
The biggest problem I see in today’s manifestation of the field is a failure to live up to that credo. I have heard lab personnel state their allegiance to the case and the prosecution. I see police ID and CSI folks who not only attach themselves to the case, but have Policies which state (as part of the “wonderful” accreditation process) that they are subservient to the investigators. Back in the day, we were never subservient to the investigation process – we knew our job and did it without “direction.”
Our field suffers the same problems as all of our society – a lowering of standards, a lowering of quality, a lowering of actual literacy. The work ethic is nonexistent (“in the day” we had no compensation, and would work 50 hour shifts to ensure the job was done; today even street cops walk off a scene at the end of an 8 hour shift, and few forensic folks will put the needs of casework ahead of their assigned work hours or their caseload of 15 per month – lord for the days folks thought an 80 case month was doing something!). This is not to say work till you drop – but a professional should recognize limitations and know when to step away because of the onset of fatigue.
That the NAS, representing the scientific community, should attempt to oversight this community is wrong – this is not an area they can identify with. Their concepts are 180 degrees form our reality – just look at contamination. On a crime scene, contamination is reality – a communal bathroom where I worked a stabbing was the biggest mix of body fluids, hairs, etc. you were never want to see. A major bombing scene is almost always on the street, with a mixture of every type of pollution one could consider – and if a government building, with marble edifice and concrete construction, explosive residue embedded into the stone and matrix from its birth. This is the reality of our world, one which is not considered by people who work in sterile lab arenas.
And the Congress is displeased with the state of forensics! This esteemed body has how many knowledgeable practitioners of forensic science…or general law enforcement…or even scientists? Predominantly attorneys, few of whom have ever been in a courtroom, fewer yet in a criminal courtroom, and even then, their exposure to forensic science is usually very limited and often stilted.
That there are problems in the field is obvious. As there are in most endeavors today. Government will not fix the problems – it may gloss them over, it may establish controls that mask them from observation (!). But it will not fix them. The fix must come from within…and by that, definitely not NAS, and not even ASCLAD, or AAFS or IAI, but rather from the practitioners, who must again embrace the basic, philosophical tenets of the field, maintain discipline (strength), and control their own destiny. Anything short and there will be no improvement, just more spending, more bureaucracy, and less accomplishment.