Evidence analysis and processing

Lois Tully, Ph.D., Deputy Chief, Investigative and Forensic Sciences Division, Office of Science and Technology, National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice

Lois Tully: Are there any other DNA dinosaurs in the room here today? So you remember those old days when our DNA methods were much more labor-intensive than they are now. We worked with radioactive labels, and it would take sometimes several weeks to get an X-ray or a radiograph with some results.

But in those days I do remember that the methods we used — they were very powerful statistically. It gives very good statistics when it worked. But in order for the DNA testing to work in those days, you had to have a fair amount of DNA, and it had to be [in] relatively pristine condition. And, as we know, when we collect crime scene evidence, that’s not normally the case. In the last 20-plus years, there have been some great advances. There’s been the polymerase chain reaction and other methods that have made DNA testing more sensitive, more specific.

We’ve found some other DNA markers that have been a great value to us in the laboratory, including DNA markers on the Y chromosome. The Y chromosome, as you know, is found exclusively in males, so especially in sexual assault cases, we now had a new tool that we could use to investigate these cases and analyze crime scene evidence.

Let me just say one thing: I think there’s a few empty seats in the front. They promised me there’d be more room in this room. They took some of the tables out. If there are other empty seats can someone point to them, so we can have everyone sit down.

We’re here today to talk about DNA testing from a variety of perspectives. We’ve done some work over the past few years — funded by NIJ — in the laboratory to help improve the methods used to analyze DNA. Dr. Jack Ballantyne from the University of Central Florida will be speaking about that research.

We’ve been fortunate over the past few years that we have strengthened our partnerships, with not only the social science side of NIJ, but also communities outside of our traditional crime laboratory communities. And we’ve been fortunate to have been working over the past few years with Dr. Pat Speck from the University of Tennessee. She’s a sexual assault nurse examiner, and she’ll be one of our speakers today also. Pat refers to herself as our “token nurse,” but she’s really been much more than that. She’s the person we go to, to get that perspective. You know, we can do some great research in the lab, but it needs to get out into the field, and we need to know what the issues are that will impact the field, so that the research has the highest utility and value. She’s been very helpful to us in giving us that guidance and giving us that perspective.

One of our other panelists is Dr. Mickey Prinz from New York City DNA laboratory, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. It’s important to bring in that perspective also, so we can do the great research; we can work with the SANE community — the sexual assault nurse examiner community — on evidence collection. But what are the other impacts of this work? How does it impact the laboratory? In prioritizing cases, in the throughput, et cetera? So Mickey will be presenting to us that perspective.

I’m excited. I think this will be a great panel. And I encourage you at the end, we should have plenty of time for questions; I encourage you to ask questions. And let’s have some discussion. I also need to let you know that this session is being videotaped by CBS News, so that’s why there’s a camera in the back.

With that I think we can get started, and our first speaker is Dr. Jack Ballantyne.

Jack Ballantyne, Ph.D., Professor of Chemistry, University of Central Florida, and Associate Director of Research, National Center for Forensic Science, Orlando, Fla.

Ballantyne: But it’s 30 years. In the course of doing this 20 years operationally and 10 years in the academic setting, I’ve personally or been responsible for the analysis or the interpretation of data or the checking of data for thousands of rape cases. All right. This is typical of people who’ve been in this business for a long period of time. In forensic science we actually deal with more rape cases per person than many of the medical personnel. Now we don’t go into as much detail in some ways, but in terms of the interpretation of data and the analysis of data and what we obtain from evidence from rape cases, we have a lot of knowledge — systemic knowledge and corporate knowledge, so to speak.

However, the knowledge is still lacking, and that’s why we started this project that I’ll talk about. And basically trying to extend or examine the period at which we can still obtain the male genetic profile from the male donor in a rape-type case after sexual intercourse.

So, my own research activity is we’ve spent a lot of time working on Y chromosome markers. I’ll talk about the postcoital time interval, but we’ve also been working on body fluid identification. We’ve realized that in rape cases that positive, good markers for vaginal fluid as well as menstrual blood will also help in the rape case analysis setting. So we’ve taken a multifaceted approach to rape case analysis. But all I’m going to talk to you today, since that’s the topic, is the one of postcoital persistence of the DNA profile — not of sperm and EP, et cetera, but the DNA profile itself.

The problem that we’re faced with is some rape victims provide samples greater than 24 to 36 hours after the incident takes place. As we know — many of you are DNA analysts, probably most — the ability to obtain the standard STR profile of a semen donor diminishes rapidly as that postcoital interval is extended. And that’s based upon the usual personal experience, as well as some studies. There are some studies. But, you know, in forensic science we like to talk over coffee or other types of libation. And it’s over these cups of coffee or other libations that these theories come up. When you stop to analyze a theory, some of them are not based on any actual hard data. That means [for] people like me, there’s an opportunity for improvement then, right? We can do research, which is good. So between 24 and 48 hours, it’s quite difficult to obtain a standard DNA profile. It’s not impossible, but it’s difficult. And greater than 72 hours is normally not possible. I’m not saying it’s impossible; it’s normally not possible.

Now the problem with that is that we have a discrepancy in the literature between the classical serology forensic science studies and reproductive physiology studies. Because you know, you go to court, and how long does sperm persist? Three days, something like that. But there’s variation in the living rape victim. And that’s what we say often or many of us have. I’ve certainly testified to that myself. But the problem is that it’s very clear from the literature that sperm, in fact, persist much longer than that in the female reproductive tract. So, for example, in the cervix, sperm persist in the cervix for seven days and beyond after sexual intercourse. Many, many studies have shown that. So there’s a big discrepancy here now between what — the sperm are present somewhere and that we have an inability to typically obtain a standard profile.

So we thought that this was an interesting problem to look at — not problem, just a study. Before I start, sperm are lost over time after intercourse takes place. You lose sperm due to lavage, drainage, you have degradative changes — the normal metabolic changes that take place that basically destroy the sperm over a period of time. We’re performing analysis; so therefore, we have detection limits of our analytical system. So if we have a poor analytical system — I’m not saying we do — but if we do have a poor one, the profile may be present but below the level of detectability. And then during the manipulations in the lab, we often, we will do differential extractions, and we do use multiple manipulations. So the more manipulations you do, the more chance you have of loss of analyte.

So for various reasons we have a problem. Some of the solutions to the problem we thought early on for [the] initial study was to use YSTRs. Obviously with YSTRs we can ignore any — in theory — we can ignore the female component of the swabs that we’re going to take. And in theory, as well, we could use no differential extraction. We could take a so-called “low copy number approach,” and that’s not the politically correct term anymore. But I still use it because it’s — I was at a meeting recently in Europe, and Peter Gill, from the Forensic Science Service, who’s the guy who coined the term low copy number approach, doesn’t use the term low copy number approach officially. But during discussions and talks all he uses is “LCN,” and he actually uses the same terminology. So a little template in approach, meaning that we may be able to analyze DNA that’s present, say, in less than 100 picograms. Could be less than that — 50 picograms or less of DNA. And the low copy number approach — there are different ways that we can improve the sensitivity — adding large quantities of DNA, for example, increase cycle number and a variety of other methods.

Then, what turned out to be critical is also different sampling. Now, there is a wide variety of sampling. Maybe Pat Speck can talk about this. There’s a wide variety of sampling processes that take place just now throughout the country. I know myself; I worked, as I said, for 30 years doing this, and I remember the first day of my job we used cervical sampling. It was a standard method. So many people do cervical sampling — cervicovaginal — some places don’t. It turns out in this particular study the ability to obtain a profile beyond four days, five days is probably critically dependent upon the cervical sampling. So what we did was we, when we started this work there was no commercial YSTR kits around, so we did a lot of this initial work with our own kits and our own samples and our own protocols. And so the conclusions of this “early work” I would call it, is that — again, not with standard kits and with our own conditions, and I’m not going to talk about this because I’m going to talk about more recent work — it’s possible to obtain a genetic profile of a semen donor in postcoital cervical vaginal samples, covered up to four days after intercourse. We used carefully selected YSTR markers; we performed new differential extraction; we used a large quantity of, therefore, of input DNA; we used increased cycle number; and we used cervicovaginal sampling. So that was initial work, and we published this initial paper in 2003.

So what happened is we kind of let it go for a while. Then we decided, OK, now there’s more interest because now there are commercial kits available. So we wanted to then — because obviously we didn’t expect many labs to be able to use their own kits and don’t want to anyway, with a notable exception of New York City, who were the first lab in the country to use YSTRs in casework, using their own primers, et cetera. So we did some work with commercial kits, and the studies I’m going to talk about now are postcoital samples taken from — these are controlled studies. And it’s important that we do these controlled studies because we want to be sure that if we say we’re detecting a male profile X number of days after the event, then it’s true. If you take real casework material, which we have to do at some stage, you’re basing that information about postcoital time on normally the victim. And some of these statements are not 100 percent correct. So there’s a certain element of inaccuracy in some of these — because of recollection, some of the victims may be under the influence of drink or drugs, that type of thing — especially these longer interval times.

So we took five donor couples, and what we did was we took cervicovaginal swabs, too, taken by each female volunteer three to seven days after separate acts of intercourse. So, three, four, five, six and seven days. And it would be only taken after a seven-day abstention period. So what I mean by that is that you would have couple one, they would abstain from sexual intercourse for a week, and then they would take a precoital sample. The next one down there, the next — the negative control is taken, that is a precoital swab is taken. That has to be negative. And then three days later, the victim will remove a cervical vaginal sample herself. Then in that same victim — not victim, sorry — the same donor ...

[Laughter.]

Ballantyne: My understanding is there wasn’t a victim in this case.

[Laughter.]

Ballantyne: The same person and the same couple will then do the same thing: abstain from sexual intercourse for a week, take a precoital sample, and then have sexual intercourse, and then four days later take another sample. So these are separate samplings. They’re not, for example, taking [a sample] after one act [at] three-day, and then will take another sample four-day, five-day, for obvious reasons. Because if you do that, you’re going to remove — you have to. Every contact leaves a trace, remember? I mean it’s like basic. You’re going to remove — and some people argue, “No you don’t.” That’s impossible, right? So we’re removing sample, if you go and take sampling at three days and four days and five days; so we have to do them separately. And we use the term “cervical brushing.” I think I’ve been hammered for this. It’s not really — and Pat’s probably hammered me, and her colleagues. This term is used; basically it’s just a cotton-tipped swab. It’s nothing special. And it’s basically sampling of the cervix using a brushing motion, apparently. So when we do this, here’s just some of the data because I’m trying to move on to other data. Here’s a four-day, I’m not showing the precoital — I’ll show you in some instances as time goes on probably, later dates.

Here’s a four-day sperm fraction — Yfiler — and here’s a full profile. And, of course, we’ve compared this to the known donors. This is a full profile. That was with Yfiler — he’s with PowerPlex Y, the two kits, right. The Promega kit and the — we looked at the Promega kit, the commercial kit and the Applied Biosystems kit. We also looked at the company in — what was it called again? In Louisiana. Reliagene. Because they’re not longer in existence. We also looked at Reliagene kits also. We reported that in our paper; I’ll show you. So four days we can get a result. And here’s a pre-five-day from one of the samples, and you can see there’s nothing there. And here’s a sperm fraction — now we, remember I talked that we didn’t do a differential; now we do differentials. We do a differential, and we actually prefer a differential now with the commercial kits. So here is a profile five days; this is five days after intercourse. And here’s the other kit.

Here’s a six-day sample. Now you can see in the six-day sample you have a partial profile here. But the profile, the alleles that are present — 12 out of 17 — are in fact the alleles from the male donor in this case. And this is standard conditions. These are standard. Now I should say the important thing about this is that the standard amplification conditions are used. This is not increased cycle number or anything else. Here’s another six-day sample. Here’s a six-day differential. So you can see that at six days you start to — five days we often get full profiles — six days we start to get partial profiles. And here’s a seven-day sample, and we don’t claim yet, believe it or not, although you can see on the right-hand side there are some allelic peaks there, and they’re consistent with the donor. But I would not hang my hat on that particular profile at this moment in time. But I’m just showing you this is what we’ve seen. And our aim is to keep going with this in terms of the number of days after intercourse.

What we did, we used a number of DNA profiling enhancement strategies. We called on that in a genetic sense. Cervical brushing is used. The differential, we prefer differential now, which is contrary to what we initially reported several years ago with our own kits. And I didn’t talk about this but we, in some cases, we will use post-PCR purification methods. Standard manufacture cycling condition was used.

The summary is that full profiles were typically easily obtained from these couples — it’s a limited study, remember, but nevertheless three to five days after intercourse. We can get profiles greater than or equal to six days, but they’re partial, mainly partial. And although I didn’t go into this because I don’t have time, the use of post-PCR purification significantly improved the ability to obtain a profile, especially from the five- to six-day sample. So that can be employed. To reiterate, again we found better profiles with differential lysis. And we still hang our hat on this seven-day profile, but we, again, we haven’t really — I can’t stand up here and say that seven days is a standard or routine method yet.

So we published this work in two papers. The top one is “Performance Characteristics of Commercial YSTR Multiplex Systems,” but that’s basically up to three days showing a simple and straightforward [method] to get routine, standard YSTR profiles three days after intercourse. And then the other paper, the bottom one in 2008 shows some of the data that I just described. So greater than or equal to three days we can get a YSTR profile.

So the current work we’re involved in now is that we’re actually specializing now in greater than or equal to five days. And we use a variety of strategies that are listed there. I don’t have time to go into them at the moment, but we are using a variety of strategies to try and improve our results. And then what we are also doing is revisiting the use of autosomal standard STR analysis just because we want to. It’s good fun.

[Laughter.]

Ballantyne: Because there are not that many studies on it. So we’ve been looking at certain things. For example, we have an alternative extraction method. Typically up until now we have not actually optimized the system where we take every single — although we collect our samples and extract DNA, we don’t actually add the whole lot, ever. We haven’t done that yet. So we know that we have room for maneuver, so to speak. So we’re looking at alternative methods at the moment where we can basically take DNA extracted and basically run the whole lot, every single piece of DNA. Remember, this is a controlled study, so we’re allowed to do that. All right, so in this particular case we’re looking at [a] particular silica-column-based purification method. The work is currently in progress, but we’re quite happy with the ability — the nice profiles — that’s two-day — here’s a two-day from this new method of extraction — three days. You can see there’s partials in some cases. Here’s a pre-six-day. Here’s a six-day. Again, it’s partial, but there are some alleles present. In fact, when we compare — and here’s a six-day sperm fraction. Another six-day sperm fraction that I previously showed you — and this is what we found. We found that if you take the six-day fraction with the standard so-called method and then we do another of this alternative extraction method, when we actually look at the results, basically — and you can’t see it very well in this I don’t think — but basically you see the results, first extraction, second extraction, and the bottom line is that on two separate occasions when you amplify this, you can get a composite profile. Now, again, I’m not suggesting that’s what we do in a real-life situation, but we can recover from that composite profile an almost complete profile.

The argument could be, it’s probably, it could be just stochastic; it’s a low copy number, so you amplify it once, you amplify it again. You get one allele coming up this time, and then [another] the next. Who knows at this moment in time, but we’re beginning to see that doing multiple amplifications may help in this type of thing.

We are looking at alternative enzymes. And one particular one that we’ve done recently, used recently is SuperTaq Plus from Applied Biosystems. And what we’re finding with this enzyme is that if you take the RFUs, we get an increase in the RFUs quite often. Some now increase, sometimes [there’s] no increase, but there’s an increase in [some of] the RFUs we found, certainly. So we’re interested in this. And here’s a Taq gold standard three-day and a SuperTaq Plus. I know it’s hard to see, but that’s a nicer profile, higher RFUs, et cetera.

To conclude I want to then talk about the autosomal, what we’re doing. So we’re just basically taking the same samples, same sampling strategy. And here’s autosomal, here’s from a four-day sperm fraction, using Profiler Plus in this case. You can see there, there’s a clear mixture. But the male profile is clear, is there. Now you have to de-convolute that mixture, but the male profile is clearly there. And it’s quite straightforward to de-convolute that mixture, relatively. Because we know the female, right? So that’s four-day. We’re finding [at] four days quite often that’s what you get. However, we hit the roadblock at five days. When five days, using the methods I’ve described, we just don’t seem to see any autosomal signal. But, remember, it’s a small number of samples, relatively, obviously. And it’s a small study. So we hit that roadblock. We know that with YSTRs we can go five, six days. With autosomal it seems four days in our hands, so far, that’s what we’re getting. And also, obviously, it becomes more difficult; you have to de-convolute that mixture in the autosomal setting.

And, basically to get this profile, we’ve had to use only one, do one wash of the sperm, et cetera, and these things I don’t have time to go into. The current and future work is that we want to continue with the postcoital samples greater and equal to five days and apply these variety of novel strategies that I didn’t really go into in any great detail, but there are a few of these tricks in our toolkit. Revisit use of autosomal STR analysis, because we really don’t want to stop at four days. We need to go beyond that. We need more extensive studies. We need more extensive studies, more samples, and hopefully — Pat Speck here will talk in a minute. We have set up a collaborative study with Pat Speck on paper. I don’t know if she’s going to talk about it, but the bottom line is we’re going to get large numbers of samples, if we can get funding for it. So we would build to do this with larger numbers of samples from real — are you going to talk about this, Pat? No? You are? So I’ll let her talk about it.

[Laughter.]

Ballantyne: I didn’t know. So, with that, I’d like to thank the — first of all I should have said that the person who has done all this work in the recent past is Erin Hanson, who is sitting in the front row there. All the other work was done by Ashley Hall, Pam Smith, [and] Kathy Press. And I’d like to thank NIJ for the funding and the support. And with that, thank you very much.

Patricia M. Speck, DNSc, Assistant Professor and Public Health Option Coordinator, College of Nursing, University of Tennessee Health Science Center, Memphis

Pat Speck: Will everybody sit down now? Hi, I’m Pat Speck from the University of Tennessee in Memphis. How many of you are going to have trouble with my accent?

[Laughter.]

Speck: Well, we’ll just get over that. But you can move closer. I also would like to thank Lois Tully and the National Institute of Justice for actually reaching out to the clinician community. Sexual assault nurse examiners have been in business since 1974. The program began in Memphis, Tenn., and it was the brainchild of a family nurse practitioner named Beverly Bounds. She wrote a federal grant and got it. And the program is up and running strong 35 years later.

The first program is not the only program. There are now well over 800 programs that employ nurses at a variety of levels. Now I mention that because the National Institute of Justice, as well as the Department of Justice, have spent considerable time and energy ensuring that victims have a say. And one of the ways to do that is to bring them to care that is therapeutic, coordinated and can bridge these systems that are so separate. One of the things we’re doing with Dr. Ballantyne is trying to bridge some of those systems. So I speak to you today as a clinician, as a person who is a family nurse practitioner. I have my own practice, and I’ve started in the SANE business — if you can call it that — in 1982, long before “forensic nurse” was the word. So if you understand that, you’ll know that I’ve seen quite a few victims. And I’d like to recognize Mike Hill, who’s here, who used to bring patients to me — in the back, back there — as an investigator in Memphis, Tenn., and he came up here. This has been a great reunion time.

So that said, let’s get going. The goal of this presentation is to inform the scientific community about what is known, and, more importantly, what is not known about factors that contribute to the successful collection of DNA, including issues associated with the rape event. What is that postcoital environment? What about evidence collection timing? We learned a little bit from Dr. Ballantyne that maybe we can extend some of these minutes to hours, and maybe even a day or two. What about the system-wide financial and legal ramifications of lengthening this timeframe? What’s it going to cost? I used to say in my early days, “please don’t identify every victim; we can’t handle them.” We were getting about 1 in 10 in the ’80s that would report to law enforcement. If we got 10 in 10, we would have been seeing over 3,000 patients a year. And we couldn’t handle it with our infrastructure. So all these things have ramifications. What about the timeframe? What about the criminal justice system? The more cases that go through, the more evidence that’s developed, the more cold hits that happen.

What about the SANE community? We have registered nurses and physicians who are working with these patients, but the laws govern their practice. And it’s in that legal ramification of the practice. This is a licensed profession — registered nursing, medical physician. The licensing requirements in states vary. So if you don’t know about that, you need to find out about it. What about the laboratory system? Can they handle the volume? And what about the victims that we all serve? What is their voice here?

So that’s my goal today, is to kind of cover that in about five minutes.

[Laugher.]

Speck: You know there are multiple conditions that contribute to the successful recovery of DNA. And that has changed over time. Some factors that influence that are known — for instance, the timeframe in evidence collection. However, in these new studies we’re looking at an expansion. But one of the discussions that occurred at our TWIG meeting was, “Well what about the timing at the month? What if it’s an older person? What if it’s a younger person? What if they’ve had a surgical hysterectomy? And what happens if, if, if, if ...” And before you knew it we had a lot of questions, more than we were answering with what’s happening in the laboratory.

So these concerns about increasing the costs, increasing law enforcement, increasing SANE time, possibly decrease the likelihood of recovery. And there are just too many questions we don’t know the answers to. I go back to my nurse practitioner practice, and I say, “OK, my infertile couple comes in. What am I going to do with that?”

So if you get a queasy stomach talking about some of the things you don’t talk about over the dinner table, you might want to consider walking out.

[Laughter.]

Speck: How many people here know what E.D. is?

[Laughter.]

Speck: You know it because of the advertisements, right? Well, you know what? In my area it means emergency department.

[Laughter.]

Speck: But today we’re talking about E.D., the erectile dysfunction and ejaculatory dysfunction. So automatically we’ve got an offender out there that may have these problems. OK, and may not give us anything but a few cells. Because, remember Locard’s theory — there’s cells exchanged. I once said to the group at TWIG, “Give me a cell in the vagina any day over a sperm, because sperm travels.” You can’t get the cell unless it’s shoved up in there. Think about it.

Condom use. We saw the advent of condoms being used in rape with the HIV epidemic. OK. And, of course, the famous case in Texas where a baggie was used and then she was accused of consenting because she asked him to wear a baggie. Go figure.

Pre-ejaculate. Most people don’t know that that’s kind of flowing out all of the time, and when it does it also ends up in the urine, which ends up in the underwear, which can — if it contacts — end up on the victim. And then there are other issues, too.

So in 1987 the first assailant was convicted of sexual assault with the help of DNA. And this case was upheld on appeal. They used RFLP. And those of you who know the history know that it used up every bit of the sample — every bit. So there was no challenge by anybody because it had to be used in RFLP. It took years for these laboratories to gear up, so we actually, in the center in Memphis, Tenn., started collecting for DNA in the middle ’80s because the science was out there, and we knew the evidence would be sitting in a police property room — dry, usually temperature-controlled. And then if the police could find it, they could bring it up. That actually came to fruit with the Innocence Project. By the way, that was not very successful in our area; only one person was freed out of over 40 they looked at.

OK. So, what did we know about it pre-1999? We knew that specimens could be positive for sperm. This is looking at the skin, the anus and the oral areas. And look, three hours we could get a very positive skin sample. And then after five hours it dropped. I promise you since that’s a skin sample at eight, it was in a crack or crevice that wasn’t going to be washed away. In the vagina it was even worse because you get samples, but they go down very quickly. Two hours, three hours, and then you get out here at 39 hours and very, very few people had a positive semen sample. Now what was going on there? Because we know from Jack’s work that, what, six days out we should be getting something, but here we are, just 39 hours out. So what’s the difference? Could it be the difference in what the victim’s development is? What their health status is? What their reproductive status is? And so these are questions that we have to ask.

And in 1999, Dr. [Linda] Ledray said these data clearly indicate the vaginal site is most likely to obtain specimens positive for sperm. Well, those of us in the infertility area knew that the cervix was the best place and usually at menses — I mean at ovulation, so that you get a real thick cervical mucus, also called the “spinbarkeit.” And this cervical mucus just loves sperm, so if you can find that then you hit the jackpot because it’s always going to have sperm in it. But they have to be at that time of the month, and they also have to be ovulating. What happens if you have any of those women who are not ovulating? Maybe on their menses? Maybe too old? Or too young? So all of these issues came to my mind, and I said, “Maybe this is another area we need to ask more about.”

Of course there’s some winds of change, and that is that forensic science is under fire. And Discover magazine said it’s quite bad. A new understanding about the reproductive track has to occur in the forensic community. In the historically health community, we get the health track. We know what health is all about. But the forensic community has not looked at health as a variable. What about the aging? What about the development? The forensic community hasn’t considered that at all because in the laboratory, you get the sperm, and that’s where you are. And it’s OK; it’s just that’s where the discipline is.

We have to re-evaluate the literature related to 72-hour evidence. And we’re going to look for strong community partnerships, and that’s exactly what I think the vision of NIJ was. Putting a clinician in with the laboratory directors was really a gold mine of exchange. And so partnerships are important.

The infertility literature — there’s lots of information about sperm. Let’s talk about it. Normal men have normal sperm. Normal men also have sperm that are not-so-normal, and it could be for a variety of reasons. But let’s talk about the normal sperm: 42 to 76 days from the time the sperm produces, it comes out in an ejaculate. Now, if it’s in the process that means about half of those guys that got out there too early are already dead. And the ones that are too young are not real fertile. So you really just have this kind of bell curve of sperm that are viable in the center. Fertile life span is 24 to 48 hours. Male human ejaculate is only about a teaspoon, although many men will tell you it’s much more.

[Laughter.]

Speck: There’s about a million sperm there that are viable. And about 20 million sperm, unless you’re going to be infertile, for the most part.

Low sperm count. A fellow wearing brief shorts all the time, working in Key West is going to probably have a lower sperm count. That’s because the cremaster muscle can’t work, which means it’s too close to the body; it’s too hot, and the sperm die off. So briefs, out; shorts, in.

Motility. Motility is dependent on the environment it’s deposited. Normal sperm morphology is critical. Sperm can have an oval head, a round head, a little mushroom cap. It looks different in different places. And there are structural problems that can contribute to whether or not sperm can be detected. So if the testes don’t descend or if the sperm are deposited in an area in the vagina that’s not the place where it’s expected to go, which is the very distant, posterior fornix, and maybe it comes out in the mid-vagina because the urethral opening is on the penis and not at the tip, then there’s a problem.

Blockage in the tubes that transport sperm. Have a guy that’s had a bunch of STIs — he’s going to be infertile, just like the woman who’s had an STI or two in the tubes is going to be infertile. Varicoceles are like veins on the legs. So if you have a variocele, that’s also going to create some problems with the sperm.

The reality is unless you have done a medical exam on the offender, you can’t know the quality and character of his sperm. How many they are? What time of the month it is? Whether he wears briefs or shorts? All of these things may impact whether or not he gets a good 100 million sperm out there. That’s the ideal. Get me that 100 million, and I’m going to give you a good PCR, STR, YSTR outcome.

Now, let’s look at the vaginal environment. Where is that patient in their cycle? Are they still having cycles? What about if they’re before menses? What about peri-menopausal? What about menopausal women? What is the menstrual cycle timing? The chance of a woman becoming pregnant at any time in a month is 1 in 30. There’s 30 days. You wash out the lining. There’s only one day essentially that that sperm can penetrate. There are some women that are very unlucky. 
[Laughter.]

Speck: Existing conditions. What happens if they have fallopian tube disease? What happens if they have endometriosis? What happens if they have any number of other things that are going on that you can’t control for?

And then what about the medications that they’re on? I didn’t mention that about men, but if they’re doing medications it affects them also. Just don’t drink and take Viagra. Don’t take nitroglycerin; it lowers your blood pressure. So the effect of the medications on the genital system are — and I’ll give you an example: Robitussin. How many of you love Robitussin when you have a cold? It’s great. It causes the cervical mucus to become liquid and contributes to infertility. So there are medications that actually cause problems.

The other thing you have to know about is that it’s not only Venus and Mars, but there’s a battle when sperm gets into the vagina. The vagina considers sperm a hostile invader, and it’s in this hostility that the sperm actually says, “I can overcome this hostility.” So, what it does is the bolus creates a gel that forms within minutes. And if it’s deposited in the right place, which is by the cervix, that’s going to last for about two to four hours. And then there’s a thing called “flow back.” And that happens because those guys, they just can’t hold out, so they get liquefied. When that happens it drains out of the vagina. That’s called flow back. Thirty-five percent of sperm is lost in flow back within five to 120 minutes.

So guess what happens to your capacity to recover sperm? Where is that sperm? It’s on the panties. So be sure and look at the panties because that’s where it is. Very few of those sperm enter the cervical canal because they got to swim in there. So the ones that are closest to that cervix have the best opportunity to get into that cervix.

How many of you know that the hymen ages? How many of you, first, know what a hymen is?

[Laughter.]

Speck: For those of you who don’t know, that’s the “cherry” that men have this fantasy about.

[Laughter.]

Speck: The hymen is a connective tissue that covers like a collar. It goes around the opening to the vagina. Sometimes it covers it completely — that’s abnormal. Sometimes it has multiple holes in it. But it ages. It is very thick at birth. It thins out and becomes very, very thin where you can see blood vessels in it. Then it starts thickening again. And it thickens its most during pregnancy. Then it starts thinning again until the little old ladies complain of the men who are taking Viagra that they’re married to. Because they don’t want to do it and the guys do. And they don’t want to do it because they’re too dry; it’s too thin; it hurts. They haven’t realized if they just go in to their healthcare provider, you can get some medicine to fix that.

So the postcoital sample that’s found up to seven days using the YSTR is found in reproductive women who have gone to the right spots. They have I assume — and this is an assumption — normal men they’re having intercourse with, and so you’ve got the ideal sample here. Cervical swabs will produce sperm when vaginal swabs do not. A nurse took some of the stuff that we’ve been talking about, and she looked retroactively into her data, and she looked at the cervical swabs they collected and the vaginal swabs. And her name’s Jean Morgan out of Ohio, and she found that guess what? We find that in the cervix more often than we do in the vagina. But don’t forget those panties.

We have a “model for information explaining and future understanding” of recovery of DNA. And this is called MIEFU just because I like acronyms. Victim plus assailant means time and activities, and that will all impact your DNA recovery. It is not independent. It’s all over the place; we just don’t know where it’s all over the place. So victim factors will influence recovery like cellular material, whether it’s sperm or cells. The assailant factors will influence the quality and quantity of the cellular material deposited. And the time will impact the degradation process. So the further away you are from it, the more likely you are not to be able to recover it. And the reality is that we don’t know many of those factors.

So let’s talk about research rate timing. The incidence of delayed reporters. We know that there’s a possibility that those women who cannot come forward in a victim-centered system may actually have an opportunity to come forward three or four days later. And that’s important because it supports the healing.

We also know the prevalence is going to be impacted. Epidemiology is going to be impacted. We’ve got reimbursement strategies, personnel costs, supply costs. Collaboration. How are you going to get an entire team to buy into collecting? What kind of investigative costs is it going to be if an officer has to go out on a rape that’s five days old?

What’s your community experience? What’s your lab doing? Because if your lab is actually collecting after 72 hours, are they, in fact, finding this sperm? If they are not, don’t change your protocol yet, because it may be that we’re going to end up with a tool that says, “If you have A, B and C, you collect; if you have D, E and F, you’re out of luck.” So unless new procedures and equipment, qualified personnel arrive, or your community experiences, we hope to provide the cohort in this proposal that we’ve submitted as a collaborative to really get the group of people.

Let’s talk about it. It’s a collaborative of the University of Tennessee and the University of Central Florida. We have applied to the NIJ, and we’re going to use the YSTR, even though it’s not maybe used in all the laboratories, it’s the common thing. And it’s because it takes mixed samples, and way too many rapes are multiple assailants, so we’ve got to be able to distinguish. You need about 100 forensic nurses. They all know where to go to get the evidence. They know where their cervixes are, and we expect them to volunteer because they all wanted to give up their bodies for forensic science. We also want to pay them. And if you know of a forensic nurse, you can certainly be part of this process, and we’d be really happy to have you as a volunteer, too. There’ll be certain criteria that need to be met. Obviously, building on what Dr. Ballantyne has started in terms of collection and timing from the event.

So I hope you enjoy the picture. Thank you very much.

Mechthild Prinz, Ph.D., Director, Department of Forensic Biology, Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, New York, N.Y.

Mechthild Prinz: I want to thank Lois for inviting me to speak on this panel. And I know there’s many, many people in this room that could give the same presentation. I’m supposed to present a practitioner’s perspective, and I know for a fact — you can’t hear? Now? OK. All right. I thought you were volunteering to give your perspective.

[Laughter.]

Prinz: I don’t want to be stating the obvious to a group of colleagues that are many of whom I’ve known for many, many years, and I know you all know what the impact would be if we received an increased volume of kits. And I almost came without a PowerPoint because I thought it was more of a sit-down panel, question-answer session. Actually I have to ask you some questions, and I have a lot of question marks on my slides. So, increase in submissions, what would that mean, and how would a more sensitive, new test modify the work flow? Increase in DNA tests, what would it mean? The reporting and even the testimony might be affected.

So, first question is if we go into these really extended postcoital intervals, will our current screening methods still work? The screening methods we use for semen-like alkaline phosphatase, p30 ELISA, sperm surge, those strip assays, I always forget the names. So, would this still work for a seven-day-old vaginal swab? And if no, would you just skip all the semen screening and go straight for male quantitation? Can I have a show of hands, how many laboratories are using a male-specific quantitation right now? So that’s definitely quite a few. How many of you go straight to extraction and do not even do semen screening anymore? All right. We’ve got one. So then the question is do you do that for all sample types? Do [you do it] like for a bed sheet — where we do the A.P. mapping to find the semen stains — or only for the kit items?

Audience member: Swabs.

Prinz: Just the swabs. So, let’s say you would switch your protocol to skip the screening, you cannot take that method offline because you still want to use it for other items, like clothing or bedding, but you might change your work flow for the rape kits only. Like some labs don’t do A.P. on kits. It’s something that you need to think about, and definitely to have the male quantitation online does help you to make an informed decision on where to go next with the sample.

I think, aside from the YSTR test, I think being at this meeting made it very clear to me that the extended intervals will become feasible because there are new methods out there. There’s this laser micro-dissection that can be used on samples where sperm is old and degraded, and there are very few. There are new, potentially really, really useful laser capture chemistries out there that might help to get the few sperm cells more consistently recovered. Even the autosomal kits — and I think Jack already showed the data for that — have gotten more sensitive. The companies are putting secret ingredients in the buffers and adding a cycle here and there. And for example, a MiniFiler kit now has 30 cycles. And they were also in the research section, there were repair enzyme posters or better tacks. So if the tests get more sensitive and we get better at recovering sperm, that definitely means we would anticipate a higher success rate on a collected vaginal swab. But I’m with Pat — do not forget the panties.

[Laughter.]

Prinz: I do not know, and I’m not sure anybody knows how many cases do get reported after the 36-hour interval that we feel is a good cutoff. So I have no idea how big the backlog would be. I have some numbers for New York City. This is just for one quarter, the third quarter of 2008. The rape percentage has kind of stayed constant over a couple of years now; it’s about 1,500 per year. So in that quarter, we did receive 375. And in our hands, 47 percent of the kits are negative for semen. And we use p30 ELISA to determine that. And if a kit is negative for semen, based on a serology test or ELISA test, one of the entry-level criminalists can write up the report. If I don’t do the semen test but just do a straightforward male quant to determine male DNA is present, yes or no, it has to be a DNA-qualified staff member that has to write the report. Because as soon as you have real-time DNA data, you need molecular biology, biochemistry, genetics continuing education — you have to be an interpreting DNA analyst. So it has a potential impact on the staff structure.

The 47-percent negative kits — what our next step then of course would be [to] look at additional items, such as panties, clothing, anything that has been submitted that might have potential semen on it, tissue samples, and things like that. So we already know that the fact that the kit is negative doesn’t mean this doesn’t wind up to be a DNA case. And 200, that’s why the 176 and the 213 don’t add up to 375. So that’s the explanation; that’s the additional evidence.

Another show of hands. How many labs do Y’s? Yes, yes. I’m very happy to see that. The YSTRs already increase the number of samples that are feasible for DNA testing because it is really, really useful in all cases where you have saliva as a biological fluid on an intimate sample like a vaginal swab. And it also pulls up the male component if you did the autosomal test, and you have minor, minor, minor male peaks, you get a nice, strong Y signal if you go to Y’s. So approximately 10 percent of the rape cases in our lab actually do go to some type of Y testing. So we already did experience an increase in samples just through this technology. The Y’s are obviously limited because there’s a reduced statistical significance of the haplotype, and you can’t use it in CODIS. Our main goal on a stranger case, of course, is CODIS. And then if you do have a male-to-male mixture, and it’s 1-to-1 in the ratio, then you have a real problem with the statistics.

The male-to-male mixture is something that we actually might see more of if we start collecting in extended intervals. Because the chances that the victim had consensual sex, of course, increases the longer — the later we collect after the — that she had seven days prior maybe had something, so I think that would increase. Hand?

Pat Speck: She could have sex before ...

Prinz: Right.

Speck: ... with her partner, have the rape, and then have sex after with her partner ...

Prinz: Right, right. And ...

Speck: ... you’ve got mixed samples.

Prinz: Yes, I think we would see more mixed samples. New York state did switch to cervical collection in the sexual assault kits now. We don’t have any data on it yet, but that also might result in having more mixed samples now. Jack mentions that already. Maybe, let’s say, Roger already doesn’t do semen testing on the vaginal swabs, and I know that some private labs don’t do that either. Let’s say, you would decide, “Oh, I will skip the semen testing if I know the kit is collected five days after the incident, but I’ll do it on the younger ones.” For example, our saliva test, we have a life span like that, where we know if a sample is too old we won’t even try. But then you need reliable case information, and as Jack pointed out, the victim might not be able to actually supply the exact time of when the incident happened. Then, do you want to make a decision? Are you going for differentializes or non-differentializes based on the interval information that you have? That’s a problem. Or would you do a different work flow if you have a stranger case versus an acquaintance case because if it’s a stranger case and it’s seven days, and then you might say, “Oh, Y’s will be the only thing that works, and that doesn’t work for CODIS. Let’s de-prioritize that case and not work it.”

I told you I had a lot of question marks in my slideshow. And these are things that we would have to consider, but I’m looking forward to the results of the study Pat talked about. I do think it’s probably coming because the technology has gotten much more sensitive.

I have been approached about semen results in court. So if you, let’s say, now you have this seven-day-old kit, you find a nice profile but you could not confirm that this male profile actually is from sperm, because you couldn’t confirm the presence of sperm. Will that still be a rape? Or will there be some type of very original explanation how the male DNA was deposited? I don’t think it’s a problem in New York City. I discussed it with some ADAs. It’s very rare whether that would make a difference, but I remember a discussion that we had in a different panel and other jurisdictions definitely had an issue with that. They really felt that it was very important that the criminalist can testify that semen was found. And then it would have that sexual connotation.

So I’m not sure. Does anybody here have experience with that? Any lawyers in the room? If there are, they’re hiding.

[Laughter.]

Prinz: I’m already finished with my presentation because I’m looking forward to having some questions and answers here. Thank you. 

Gerry LaPorte: Good afternoon, everybody. I hope everybody enjoyed their lunch. My name is Gerry LaPorte, and I am the Forensic Policy Program Manager within the Office of Investigative and Forensic Sciences, which is within the National Institute of Justice.

It's my pleasure today to have a very distinguished panel seated here to my left. Mr. Joseph Peterson is going to handle the bios and kind of introduce each of the speakers and so forth, but my job here is just to moderate and then to introduce Joe, and then he'll kind of take it over from that point.

Mr. Peterson is a professor and director of the School of Criminal Justice and Criminalistics at the California State University, Los Angeles. For the past 35 years, Mr. Peterson's research has monitored the evolution of forensic science, documenting its growth potential as well as its shortcomings. Mr. Peterson's 2002 and 2005 reports, Census of Publicly Funded Forensic Crime Laboratories, for the Bureau of Justice Statistics, have documented high caseloads, long backlogs, and severe budgetary and personnel needs. His NIJ sponsored research has also examined the role and impact of forensic evidence at key decision points in the judicial process, such as arrest, charging and determination of guilt or innocence in sentencing.

His current research examines the backlog of sexual assault kits in crime laboratories, which is the theme of this session right now. So this is obviously a very, very hot issue right now, so I am going to let Joe take over.

Joseph L. Peterson: Thank you, Gerry, and good afternoon to everybody.

I should note that I was involved in those censuses of crime labs. Actually, it was Kevin Durose who published the 2005 data a couple of years ago, so I want to acknowledge on that.

We have a wonderful panel, and we're going to be addressing different aspects of this backlog problem. And I am going to wind up at the end and just give you an overview of the research that we're doing in Los Angeles in terms of looking at the results of the testing of cases that were in the backlogs of the Los Angeles Police Department and Sheriff's Department and tell you some other things that we're doing.

But we're going to start our panel discussion today with Mr. Kevin Strom, who is a senior research scientist at RTI International. Actually, I got to know Kevin when he worked for the Bureau of Justice Statistics a number of years ago. His research interests include law enforcement responses in community violence and the impact of forensic science on the criminal justice system. He's published widely, both government reports as well as academic journals. And most recently, Kevin and colleagues did some very interesting survey work on the backlog issue of forensic evidence, and he's going to speak to that issue right now.

Kevin?

Kevin Strom: Thank you.

So, today, I'm going to talk about a survey we concluded for NIJ last year. This survey was focused on forensic evidence processing in state and local law enforcement agencies. A lot of the information out there is based on forensic backlogs in crime labs, and this particular effort was focused on sort of the other side of the fence, what's going on in law enforcement agencies, how are agencies processing and moving these cases forward, what's the decision making, how is the evidence maintained, and where maybe some solutions for how some of these things can work more efficiently.

So the final report came out in October 2009. It's available on the NIJ website, and there have been some other — one other article that appeared in Criminology & Public Policy based on this work that came out last month.

So what do we know about evidence backlogs more generally? As I mentioned, forensic backlogs within crime laboratories are relatively well established. These trends have fluctuated over time. There is some evidence that suggests recent funding through NIJ has resulted in some reductions, but as a whole, the BJS surveys have shown that based in 2002, there was a backlog of over 260,000 cases, and in 2005, the subsequent survey showed that these backlogs increased by a factor of 24 percent.

NIJ also conducted a study earlier in the 2000s that looked at unanalyzed evidence in law enforcement agencies. So these were defined as cases that were unsolved, that had forensic evidence associated with them, but for one reason or another never went to a crime lab for analysis.

This earlier study was focused on biological evidence only, and it found that there were over 50,000 unsolved homicides, nearly 170,000 unsolved rapes that contained biological evidence but were never sent to a crime lab. They also estimated about 264,000 unsolved property crime cases that contained biological evidence. So this is sort of the foundation for some of this work. The goal for NIJ was to conduct this survey of law enforcement agencies and also to look at some things in more detail, what type of evidence was involved and what were the different capacity issues for these agencies.

So the primary objective was to estimate the number of unsolved violent homicide and rape cases and property cases that contained some form of forensic evidence, not just DNA, but that were not submitted to a crime laboratory for some particular reason. We also look at the estimates of the types of forensic evidence within these cases and also describe the capabilities and procedures in law enforcement agencies for processing, submitting and retaining evidence.

Today, I'm going to focus mainly on the results that look at the unanalyzed cases and then also talk a little bit about the capacity issues within the agencies.

A little bit of background on the survey: It was a nationally representative survey. We sampled more than 3,000 state and local law enforcement agencies, all large law enforcement agencies, so all those with 100 or more sworn or included with certainty in the sample, and then we selected a stratified sample of smaller agencies.

It was a multi mode data collection: web, mail, fax, telephone. As you can imagine, this is not very easy information to collect. Some law enforcement agencies have this information readily available. They have databases that can pull this out, but many do not. So, in those cases, we asked them to approximate these numbers for us as best they could, and we really worked with them to try and come up and try and limit burden on them in providing this information.

We also worked with an expert panel of forensic scientists, law enforcement agents, researchers and others to develop the survey instrument and to follow up with specific agencies as needed, and, of course, NIJ was involved throughout the process.

A little bit on response modes: Overall there was a 73 percent response rate. Nearly half of the responses came by web, about 40 percent through hard copy mail, 11 percent by fax, and we did some telephone follow-up, but very few people completed by phone. Mostly, the telephone was used to prompt agencies to respond, and anybody that sort of followed survey research notes at the web-based responses, which used to be a sort of a lower proportion, have grown steadily over time.

This is just a screenshot of the web base, the website where agencies could log on with a unique password, enter in information, and the website also allowed us to track responses in real time.

So the response rates by agencies, as I mentioned the 73 percent response rate overall; municipal police departments had a 75 percent response rate and then state police agencies 63 percent. Also, what you see by agency size, those agencies were most likely to respond that were larger, so, essentially, smaller sheriff's departments had the lowest response rate overall.

So what do the data show? Over a five-year period, we asked about a five-year period from 2003 to 2007. There were an estimated — nearly 4,000 estimated homicide cases that contained some form of forensic evidence but that were not submitted to a crime lab for analysis. This represented about 14 percent of all estimated unsolved homicide cases.

For rapes, about 27,500 estimated rapes that again contained some form of forensic evidence but were not submitted to a laboratory, this represented about 18 percent of unsolved cases.

For property crimes, nearly five million, which is not a surprise considering how many property crimes, the sheer number of property crimes out there, and that represented about 23 percent of unsolved cases with unanalyzed forensic evidence.

So the numbers are fairly large. The magnitude of these is debatable in terms of the sheer scale. Based on the amount of evidence that flows through the system, some folks have looked at these numbers and said, “Well, these aren't very surprising; in fact, they could be a little bit low,” whereas others have had the opposite viewpoint.

When you look at the types of forensic evidence contained in these backlog cases — and this is just for homicides and rape cases — about 40 percent contain some form of DNA evidence. Trace evidence was included in about 27 percent of these cases; 26 percent contained some form of latent prints and firearm and tool marks in 23 percent. So DNA, while not involved in all these cases, was the most likely form of evidence to be contained in these unanalyzed homicide and rape cases.

When looking at the breakouts by agency size, as one can imagine, larger police agencies for the unanalyzed homicides accounted for more than 80 percent, but the same was not necessarily true for especially rape and property cases. So smaller agencies, those with less than 50 officers, accounted for about 30 percent of those cases. Collectively, agencies with 100 or less sworn accounted for about 40 percent of the unanalyzed rape cases. So the perception of large agencies, that we can just focus on large agencies to improve some of these issues, I think is misleading, especially for rape cases.

This just shows a little bit more about agency size, by agency type. Again, you see that municipal police departments accounted for most of the homicide and rape cases, and I guess, most notably, for state police agencies, they accounted for about one in 10 unsolved rape cases.

So where are some reasons why this evidence isn't moving through the system? Perhaps the most common reason was that there was no suspect identified in the case, and so, in some instances, this may be an issue with the investigator either not fully understanding or maybe there being some type of procedural issue that may not allow them to submit the case forward. In some cases, there was the issue with the prosecutor. The analysis had not been requested by the prosecutor; 15 percent indicated that was the reason the evidence hadn't been submitted. And, also, in 12 percent, the suspect had been identified but not formally charged. So these investigative-type issues are affecting the flow of evidence in some of these cases.

Laboratory resource and timeliness issues, while not as prevalent, were also noted. The inability of the laboratory to produce timely results was reported in 11 percent of the instances, insufficient funding for analysis 9 percent, and the fact that the lab will not accept evidence due to backlog issues in 6 percent. And remember these are based on the perceptions of the law enforcement agency.

Finally, some other factors that influence, the inhibiting factors that influence the submission of evidence: 24 percent indicated the suspect had been adjudicated without the forensic evidence, 17 percent reported that they were uncertain of the usefulness of forensic evidence in that particular case, and 2 percent were uncertain where to send the evidence for analysis.

A little bit about evidence retention: We also ask about evidence retention policies within the law enforcement agency. Less than half of agencies reported having such a policy for preserving biological evidence in cases in which the defendant was found guilty. One in five agencies were unsure about such a policy, and for instances where the agency did have a policy, but the investigating law enforcement agency was responsible in the vast majority of the cases for storing that evidence.

The same was true for unsolved cases. So the bottom line is that in almost all instances, the vast majority of incidents, both unsolved and solved cases, the burden of retaining, storing and tracking that evidence normally comes down to the law enforcement agency.

So what are some of the study implications, some of the more generalizable issues that come out from this study? One is certainly that law enforcement agencies continue to face substantial forensic backlogs for homicide, rape and also property crime cases. One in seven unsolved homicide cases, one in five rape cases and one in four property cases that contain some form of forensic evidence were not submitted to a crime lab for analysis. Those backlogs were not just limited to large agencies, especially for rape cases, which is an important point.

It also indicates that there is some additional training that is required in enhanced policies regarding the use of forensic evidence. It shouldn't be just up to one investigator or a single person within an agency to make all these decisions, some more checks and balances about how cases move forward.

I should also mention that policies that really move to the completely other side and that require all evidence be submitted under all circumstances I think are also a little bit suspect in terms of really preserving the resources available in the system.

Some law enforcement agencies continue to have the mind set that forensic evidence is beneficial primarily for prosecuting crimes, not just for developing new leads in investigations, and again, sometimes there's procedural issues within the crime lab, within the prosecutor's office that really contributes to that mind set.

Another really important point was about information systems and the ability to track evidence within the law enforcement agencies and also as it moved on to the crime lab and then to adjudication. Only about four in 10 law enforcement agencies report having a computerized system in place capable of tracking forensic evidence in inventory.

This is a major area of need. We really need to get better at how we track evidence and especially as it moves from one part of the system to the other; also, more guidelines, documentation and resources for evidence processing. Policies must take into account the resources available in law enforcement agencies, as I mentioned. In most instances, they're responsible for tracking and maintaining this evidence over time, and really more assistance and more resources need to be provided to allow them both to maintain this evidence and also better understand what evidence can be discarded.

Finally, this is just a review of the training, creating computerized systems, improving storage capacity, but then also a system-wide approach to improve coordination among the police, the labs and the prosecutors. This could include dedicated staff that are responsible for case management, regular teams for case review and computerized systems, but really a coordinated approach to looking at this as opposed to each entity looking at their forensic evidence and, as it moves, it becomes someone else's problem. So a more coordinated approach around how this evidence is thought through and placing more checks and balances to decide what evidence should proceed and what would have the most utility for solving and investigating these crimes.

Thank you.

[Applause.]

Joseph L. Peterson: Thank you, Kevin.

I think what we'll do is we'll wait for questions until the very end. I think we may have time for some questions and for some discussion of the panelists.

Our next presenter is Dean Gialamas. He is the director of the Los Angeles Sheriff's Crime Lab in Los Angeles, California. That's a jurisdiction that serves over six million residents, and they're an institution that's fully accredited by the American Society of Crime Lab Directors.

Dean is the immediate past president of ASCLD and is also a member of the Consortium of Forensic Science Organizations, and I'm proud to say he's a graduate of our program at Cal State. And he will discuss the situation with Los Angeles County's background on the backlog as it formed there and in terms of what they're actually doing about it in the Los Angeles County.

Dean?

Dean M. Gialamas: Thank you, Joe. Good afternoon, everyone.

I am going to take you through a little historical perspective of Los Angeles County, and as I give you a little, brief overview of what I'm going to talk about today, I'll talk about how the backlog was created, so to speak, why for me on my soapbox, backlogs are actually a false metric. It's really something that I find as a meaningless number. We'll review some of the statistics from the program and then what the next steps are for us at L.A.

Just a quick overview, so everybody understands what L.A. County comprises. A pretty large county, probably larger than a majority of the states in the union, 11 million people, 4,000 square miles. We have 88 cities with 47 independent police departments that operate within L.A. County, and we provide service specifically for DNA to every one of those agencies except for one, and that's the City of Los Angeles, who has their own crime lab. And, in fact, the data I'm going to present today is only for all the areas of Los Angeles excluding the city. If we added the city to it, these numbers would easily double just because of the numbers that the city has been dealing with.

A little bit about the lab: We not only provide service to the sheriff's department but all those cities as well, about 50 other law enforcement agencies when you factor in things like Cal State University police or Amtrak police and all these other interesting police departments that operate at a local, state and federal level. Our lab is about 300 sworn and professional staff, and we get about 80,000 evidence submissions a year. So it's a pretty large operation, which, when you see the numbers, you will understand the perspective.

So how does the backlog emerge in L.A.? Well, it started with some local attention. Our partners across the way at the city were going through their sexual assault kit backlog program. It caught the attention of the L.A. Times several times. Then the Human Rights Watch got involved and wrote a very detailed report about what was going on in the City of Los Angeles, trying to raise awareness issues, seeing that L.A. was a place to start, and they have pledged to move forward all across this country. So don't worry; you'll get your chance, too.

[Laughter.]

Gialamas: Concerns were raised by the local rape treatment center operators, and so all these things culminated into the sheriff's office, at which point in time a policy decision was made. And the sheriff's policy decision was if a sexual assault kit is collected, then it will be tested, end of discussion. That is the effective triage, and that is exactly what we have now in both the City of Los Angeles and in Los Angeles County. If a kit is obtained, it will be tested, regardless of merit or other issues or circumstances in the case.

So we needed to get a handle, then, on how many kits we actually have now and then worry about what's going to come in the door tomorrow. So we initiated a hand count. It was an inventory of all the freezers. We got parkas for everyone. Off they marched, and they did an inventory and counted 6,113 sexual assault kits that were in local storage at some location or another.

Now, while that inventory was being completed, we also generated a database, and the database is because we did not have a LIM system that was capable of integrating information from independent law enforcement agencies with the crime lab. So we needed a way of tracking these, and our existing LIMS was not capable of doing it. So this was the first of many databases that were created in order to help us manage this particular problem.

So, as we started going through the data, what we then tried to determine was this is a hand count of everything that exists. Because some of these kits may have actually been returned to those storage locations already analyzed, the question then was, well, how many of those kits were previously worked, and that number ended up being just over 1,400. So that left our magic starting number of 4,675 unanalyzed sexual assault kits that were now part of our backlog with the breakdown that you see, and if you can imagine what happened in the laboratory, we went from having about 25 cases that were pending and are needed to be done according to the investigators and law enforcement to having 4,675 cases just in a matter of days; hence, my reason for why backlog is a meaningless number.

Why is it meaningless? Well, first of all, backlog is really an input of — is a measurement of inputs; it's not a measurement of productivity at all. In fact, it doesn't even measure efficiency, and that's unfortunately what a lot of policymakers get wrapped up with.

A good example of that is the NIJ Convicted Offender program. Many of you have known for the last several years, NIJ has graciously funded convicted offender backlog reduction programs, and from the start of that funding until today, the backlogs have actually grown, not decreased, and it is not because people aren't working. In fact, we have gotten more efficient. It's that more states have added either arrestee laws or additional laws on the books that are now collecting more and more samples.

So the idea of a backlog is a static number. It is really a slice in time, and it doesn't give you a real full perspective on efficiency. It also doesn't tell you anything about productivity or turnaround time, which is oftentimes what we, even ourselves, as crime lab managers and supervisors, get wrapped up in.

A good example of that is in Orange County, California, very little or low backlog. Through programs that were initiated with batching and other things, we went from processing about 3,000 samples a year to over 13,000 samples a year, and during that same time frame, our backlog went from essentially zero to over 2,500 cases waiting to be done simply because of property crimes. So, even though our turnaround time and our productivity increased four and five times over, our backlog went through the roof.

So policymakers, unfortunately, relying on backlogs are looking at this magic number and they want to see it go away, and they don't realize that there's really no connection between inputs and productivity and the number that they are asking for in the public. So that is really an educational piece that we have to be wary of.

I only mention this because it's a soapbox item for me, because we get wrapped up in it, too, and I think we need, as professionals in this field, to stop using that term or at least defining what it means when we do use it because it can be viewed erroneously and actually come back to bite us.

Backlogs are not controlled by the laboratory. Because they're inputs, it's controlled by our client users; it's controlled by the crime rates, which can go up and down. I don't know about you, but our property crime rates are plummeting in Los Angeles, and yet our level of submissions in the laboratory continues to increase. That's, again, we're a victim of our own success. So we have to be careful of the terms we use.

Well, going back to the L.A. problem, when we were in the survey phase, we decided to triage the cases based on the potential probative value. We designed an audit questionnaire that went out to all the law enforcement agencies. We asked for a two-week turnaround time, which, for the most part, proved okay, but for larger agencies or those that had a significant number of kits, like in the thousands, that proved to be an inadequate amount of time for the very same reasons that Kevin just described about getting surveys returned. Not enough data, no LIMS, no database exists to track this kind of information.

We did have overall about a 75 percent return rate, and we followed up with a personal touch on those that we didn't get any response from. And here are the categories that we broke down that we found useful. Category one being an unknown suspect, those would be given priority. And I might mention that unlike other agencies' experience, very few of these cases were what we would typically call the “stranger rape” situation. They were, for investigative purposes — the investigator, even though it was an unknown suspect, really had no desire to be pursuing this case in the first place — known suspect cases, DA rejects, those that had been adjudicated, incomplete audit returns and some in which the elements of the crime had not even been established.

So here's the overall breakdown, and I hope those in the back can read some of the numbers. I tried to get this as large as I could, but we ended up — of the 6,113, we ended up with about 6,073 cases that actually met the merits of working under this program, with an approximate percentage breakdown of 31 percent that had been analyzed and 69 percent that had not been analyzed in our inventory, and so focusing on the 69 percent, this is the breakdown based on category. Only 20 percent of those cases were actually unknown suspect. All the rest met all the criteria of the other category: known suspect, DA reject. These were essentially cases that wouldn't typically be worked by most crime labs because most of the time investigations wouldn't be submitting them. There was really no probative value in knowing that information.

For example, many of the known suspect cases happened to be situations where the assailant was known. There was no question that there was an act of some sexual-related issue, but it was just an issue of consent. Well, a DNA test isn't going to resolve the issue of consent. That's an investigative process. So conducting the DNA test on those types of cases was not probative in the sense of the investigation, which is why many of these cases were never submitted in the first place.

It'll be very interesting to see over time how this data kind of shakes out, and we will get to it a little bit later, as Dr. Joe Peterson will talk about some of the work that Cal State L.A. is pursuing on that.

Now, we ran into the obvious dilemma that most of you would have. When you go from nothing, have 25 cases, to 4,675, you just don't have the resources to do that overnight. So we chose the outsourcing component. We now use a total of seven laboratories that help us out. We have five contract private laboratories. We also have assistance from two law enforcement agencies. One is California DOJ, and the other is Marshall University, who are assisting us with the testing.

We did take some time to get this ramped up. It took time to get contracts developed and in place. The metrics that we needed, we needed to deal with some of the laboratory audits, which were just some of the start up procedural issues to get through.

We started sending off at the early stages about 20 kits a month — I'm sorry — 20 to 60 kits a month. We are now actually sending more than 500 kits per month out to these private laboratories. As you can imagine, it's a huge undertaking. It's a lot of work to be putting through and getting out to these entities.

Our funding, as you may wonder where this is all coming from, is actually paid for, NIJ grant funding — thank you very much, NIJ.

[Laughter.]

Gialamas: Local Prop 69 funding, which is a DNA funding component in California; for those that aren't from California, there was a bill passed several years ago that for every felony conviction, one dollar out of every 10 dollars that is collected in fine money actually gets held back for the purposes of DNA testing; 75 percent of that stays locally and 25 percent of it goes to California DOJ to help deal with the Convicted Offender programs there. And then we also had department funds.

Now, with every crisis comes opportunity, and we had our crisis, and fortunately for us, we got our opportunity as well. This resulted in an additional $2.3 million from our local board of supervisors to ensure that this problem doesn't resurface again. We have actually been able to accomplish to date everything on our project without even using that funding. We don't know whether it'll be there or not, given our budget cuts that we are facing, but at least at this point, we have not dipped into that allocation.

We did request additional personnel. We saw the bottlenecks that would be coming, and the one significant one was sending all these cases out. When they come back in, somebody has got to review the data, somebody has got to spend the time to upload them, and so we projected that and we asked for additional personnel. So we have six new DNA analysts and one additional supervisor to help out with this dilemma. And then we just recently were awarded a grant award from NIJ, which will help us with our continuing backlog efforts.

So what are some of the interesting numbers to date? Well, so far we have outsourced over 94 percent of the identified untested sexual assault kits. This problem happened, as some of my L.A. colleagues will know — really, the meltdown was a date they will never forget, November 1, 2008. It's a date etched in their memory. And so, since that time, we actually can see the light at the end of the tunnel. It's starting to feel like, wow, we're going to get through this.

So that's 4,028 cases out of the 4,271 that were sent out. Of those, 41 percent were negative for the biologic screen and 59 percent were positive for biological screen, and that's a very interesting number because I think, empirically, I have always held that, you know, roughly 60 to 70 percent of those cases come up positive, and here is actual data, over thousands of cases, which kind of confirms what we've known all along. Of those 59 percent that were positive, 37 percent qualified for CODIS upload, 27 percent failed to meet the upload criteria and the other 36 percent are pending data review. And you might think that 36 percent is relatively high, but that's only 430 cases, and it's sending 500 cases out a month. That's really only one month's work of data that has to be reviewed and entered. So it's really not that far behind, even though that percentage may make it seem like it's rather high.

Well, what does this mean from the public perspective, because I always love to ask that question, and as a taxpayer, I guess my first question is, well, how much did this wonderful plan cost us? Well, so far, we've spent $1.7 million to test these kits. Well, on average now — this is giving, this is just a really rough average, right; this is not the true cost of our kit — but if you just take that 1.7 million into the number of kits we've done, that's about $850 a kit. So this is not inexpensive work, and that figure does not include any of the in-house time that we spend on data tracking, on searching for these kits, identifying the samples out of the kit that we are going to remove and send off, and the data review that happens afterwards. So, when we look at the total cost of this program, it is going to far exceed what this number is, but that's where we are so far.

And so the next logical question, as our local politicians like to know, is, well, great, how many crimes have we solved? This is a bit misleading; the answer is two. We have had two cold hits that have actually led to a prosecution. Now, over the course of time, including our backlog program and the regular program, we have had about 150 hits. A majority of them are still under investigation, but of the 60 or so that they have actually pursued, most of them were DA rejects. Most of them were rejected because the case had already been adjudicated. It's only two so far that have actually led to something.

Now, this presents a very interesting social economic question of the value, then, of pursuing all of this work for those two cases, and it is very hard to look at these two and say that they're not important, and I don't want to be misheard by saying what I just said because, if we have brought resolution to two victims who have gone through a horrific incident, then that is time and money well spent.

I think what we need to ask ourselves — and, again, this is, I think, the interesting study that Dr. Peterson will be doing — at what point can we look at, instead of just barrage and doing them all, is there some scientific way in which we should proceed through cases; is there some real merit to saying we're going to triage cases in this fashion because we have data to show that you tend to get more probative value and better results when you proceed in this fashion. So that'll be a very interesting study to pursue.

A couple of things of what worked and what didn't. First of all, taking the time to inventory and fully assess the problem, we used existing performance metrics to carefully project our time. As it stands now, we told our board of supervisors it was going to take a certain amount of time. We're going to be completing this well ahead of the time we told them; however, we hope that — at least we are not telling them that at this point. We are telling them everything is going — we're going to be meeting it on time, but our goal is that we are going to be — we are going to be done well ahead of where we had planned on.

Our immediate chain of command at our local division level really understood the issues, and that helped bridge some of the gaps between the upper department executives who really didn't understand this process. Anecdotally, the sheriff thought, well, we could just do like we do in jails, right, just bring in a platoon, lay out a bunch of temporary tables; let's have an assembly line. We should get this done over the weekend, right? Uh huh.

We had highly dedicated staff that were motivated to get this done.

Some things that didn't work: I mentioned already we didn't have a LIM system, and that was a huge impediment to us. We were designing databases on the fly, and if we could go back, we'd even do it all over again. But we are where we are, and it is what it is.

We did not account for evidence staff, and that was really a failure on our part. The idea that we have now 4,000 more items that have to be transacted multiple times back and forth, we really should have thought of adding additional staff to our evidence control function.

And then, of course, what didn't work was convincing the executives that this really wasn't the best strategy to pursue this testing, but, again, you know, when it's political, time is of essence and so getting those answers quickly is important.

So what do we look forward to? We look forward to dealing with our increased productivity with robotics and new technology. Automation and technology are going to revolutionize what we do. We're getting that in now.

We have some new submission forms, so we are trying this triage process that we worked on this series. We're doing that now with cases that are coming in since everything that's collected will be tested. We're moving toward batching, so we should see some significant increases, much like other labs, usually on the order of, you know, multiple times over two, three, four times the productivity.

We're still struggling with increased follow-up by investigators on CODIS hits. That, I know, is an issue that plagues many different jurisdictions, and we're no different. We do need to increase productivity on our CODIS reviews, and I guess I'm daring to tap dance on some of the current hot-button issues right now, and I don't want to suggest that we need changes to the way CODIS is being dealt with, but one of the things that we're looking at is whether or not we can really look at some true software-type components that can help us out with these mixture interpretations.

Now, there's good systems out there and they do well with single or two-person mixtures, but, beyond two people, they really just don't cut the mustard. And I think what we need is we need some groundbreaking work to pursue that, and we're actually working with some individuals now who are some real prodigies with computerized systems. I joke with my staff and I've told them, “You know, if these guys can design missile systems to put missiles thousands away on a target and be within a few inches, then, by God, they've got to be able to interpret a few DNA profiles. They can't be that hard.”

And then future limitations will be turnaround time, and, actually, Kevin touched on this a little bit as well, and I think it's really the speed of information. And there is actually a whole session on some of this later, but I think the future limitation to crime labs is not going to be so much the technology, because I think it's here; it's the speed of information flow.

When we do studies and we look at time motion studies, a significant amount of time — and I am talking 40, 50, sometimes 60 percent of our time — is about moving information from one area to another. It's copying information, biographical information for a report, putting data onto worksheets. That's the kind of stuff that's going to kill us in productivity, and until we get some real systems in to be able to make this faster, we're not going to see bounds and leaps in productivity, because the automation is here. It's all about moving that information flow.

And, lastly, our goal is all the same, right? It's to provide information. We are not concerned necessarily about who we help, but, ideally, what we want to do is we want to hold those who've committed crimes accountable, and those who have been wrongly accused, we want to assist in exonerating them from their hold on law enforcement.

So my review of the, quote/unquote, “backlog problem” in L.A. Thank you for your time.

[Applause.]

Joseph L. Peterson: Thank you, Dean.

Our final presenter today is Jeff Nye, who is the DNA technical leader with the Michigan State Police Forensic Science Division. Jeff has extensive experience, 15 years or more, in the field of forensic DNA testing. He currently oversees the technical operations of the Forensic Biology Unit for seven Michigan State Police laboratories and their database that has 65 additional staff, and he's also responsible — this is no small task — for and project manager of the Detroit Police Department Backlog Sexual Assault Kit Project that he's heading, also.

So I give you Jeff Nye.

Jeffrey Nye: Well, I could make this really simple and probably just follow Dean's talk by saying “ditto” because I think we're kind of going through the process.

[Laughter.]

Nye: But I'll go through the talk as it is.

I wanted to give a little bit of idea, the outline of my talk, and, basically, the point that I want to do is much like what Dean was saying. These backlogs were not created overnight, and so I want to kind of set time back a little bit to 2008, give you an idea of where we were at in 2008, give you an idea of the Detroit Police Department Crime Laboratory, and then kind of fast forward to today and let you know exactly where we're at today and then talk significantly about the CSC kit backlog that's occurring in the city of Detroit and then talk a little bit about some of the pending legislation and possible solutions to a couple of technology issues.

So, as was stated, Michigan — everybody is familiar with the geography of Michigan; it's the mitten state. We have seven laboratories within the state. They're geographically positioned throughout the state. We have three of those that are appearing in red with the asterisk that actually do DNA testing. The other four laboratories have our serology screening portions available to it.

In 2008, the important point to point out is that we had 265 people within our Forensic Science Division. We had 13 serologists and 17 DNA analysts, which is a really small number, and so we were not in fantastic shape in 2008 to handle a situation like the Detroit Police Department Crime Laboratory.

In 2008, we completed just a shade under 7,300 biology cases; that's about 250 per person per year. And we still carried a backlog in 2008, just shy of 3,000 cases.

How did we meet the demand with the small number of people that we had? Much like Dean had mentioned — and I'll reflect that here as well — we have a very dedicated, high-performing staff, and I think that that can be said for just about every laboratory that's out there as well as the law enforcement agencies. Everybody is very, very dedicated and very interested in moving things along. It's just getting everybody to speak to the same message and work together.

We also used a combination of outsourcing. We outsource a fairly significant amount of casework. We have a standing offer to our scientists for 30 hours per pay period — that's every two weeks — of overtime. I have worked in the division for 15 years, and I think we've had that standing offer of 30 hours per pay period for probably 10 of the 15 years. And as we hire in nice young people that are single, that overtime looks pretty good.

[Laughter.]

Nye: It doesn't last particularly long. After about three or four years, they're pretty much burned out on the overtime. And our average consumption rate, even though 30 hours of overtime is available, our average consumption time is about six hours every two weeks, just to give you an idea of how burdened they are with that.

Out of the 30 people that we did have in 2008, eight were actually funded federally through NIJ. So we actually can attribute about 22 of our positions in forensic biology just to state funding. We, too, have looked at issues for capacity improvements through automation, and we've become very, very active with General Motors, which, of course, is a huge entity within the state of Michigan, for process mapping, which is a system that a lot of people have been using in forensic biology. Process mapping has been a very big endeavor, and we just incorporated it with General Motors, which I think everybody could agree that if you're working in an assembly-line type of situation, they probably are the experts on process mapping.

I heard a talk a little bit ago. We had one assistant to a state senator, Senator Cropsey, was speaking a little bit this morning to some of the statistics in Michigan. We have the moniker of having three of the most violent cities in the top 10 in the country. So those would be Saginaw, Flint and Detroit, all associated with the automobile industry. And then I'm going to focus just a little bit on the city of Detroit, just historically, and I think everybody can read the news just like I can.

Historically, they're about a size of two million people within the city historically. They are down to about 900,000, actually maybe closer to about 850,000 people, so it's definitely a city that's in decline, and it's a very violent city, 400 to 500 homicides per year and somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,500 sexual assaults per year within the city limits.

The Detroit Police Department held the only other accredited crime laboratory in the state. The only discipline within their crime laboratory in 2008 that was accredited was DNA. It was a very large discipline. It had two scientists and one technical leader.

And they had other disciplines in firearms, control substances and trace chemistry. Their latent print unit was not part of their laboratory system; it was part of the investigative unit. As I said, biology was the only accredited discipline, and they dealt with similar issues as what everybody else is. Their facility was in very poor condition. They obviously had some staffing issues, and I won't elaborate, but there were some significant communication issues between law enforcement and the prosecutor's office.

Their capacity, annually, in 2008, they did about 350 cases a year, and it doesn't take a Harvard degree in math to see that when you have 400 homicides a year and close to 2,500 sexual assaults, they were hardly touching what was available to them. In a five-year period, they put in 582 profiles in CODIS. Two hundred and twenty of those, as a side note, were the result of outsourcing; 360 as the result of testing that they did within their laboratory system.

They closed. I think that's probably pretty well common knowledge. What prompted the closure was a defense expert in firearms, who actually was a previous Michigan State Police forensic firearms examiner, had noted an inconsistency on a case. It was a very typical shooting within the city of Detroit. It was an assault weapon that discharged about 30 rounds of ammunition in a homicide, and the firearms examiner said that it all came from the same weapon, and believe it or not, it came from about two, if not three, different weapons. As a result of that, from fallout, the state police was asked to do an audit of their laboratory system, and they noted a 10 percent error rate within their firearms unit. It was a sufficient amount of information for the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office to close that laboratory down, and that was all disciplined and it was immediate. There was no opportunity to prepare for the closure of that laboratory.

Subsequently, from that, they requested additional audits of the laboratory. Any time one of the cases goes forward to court that was processed within that laboratory, it's reanalyzed by our staff. They are doing a five-year audit of the firearms unit as well as a one-year audit of all other disciplines. And we did transfer their CODIS unit to the state police, and there were some technical difficulties with that just from differences in DNA platform.

What did we do in response to that? We hired 12 new scientists. We hired 10 plus two supervisors. I just released 10 of those for actual casework on Friday last week. So they've been hired for about a year, went through a very rigorous training program, and, hopefully, they're going to be very productive here in the short term.

In order to accommodate the additional staff that we hired, we had to do a lot of facility renovation and everything within our locations. Just to give you an idea of some of the things that we had to consider that we didn't necessarily understand when they first closed down was, even just transferring evidence to our facility; the Detroit Police Department became the largest submitter of evidence to the state police crime labs overnight, and just process mapping that evidence submission and receipt was incredible. We receive approximately 100 to 125 cases per day, five days a week, 365 days a year from the Detroit Police Department.

As I said, we get a single point of entry. That is an updated number that I have there. We had to find a place to actually store evidence, and I have a picture of some pod storage units that we had to purchase for one of our laboratories. We had to hire a coordinator to move evidence throughout the state. We have two laboratories within the metro Detroit area that are close by, but the amount of evidence that is coming in, it actually impacts all seven of our laboratories. So we move evidence around the entire state. We have become the FedEx of forensics, I think.

We prioritize our cases by court order. Routinely, most every day, we are getting a court order from the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office to prioritize cases, and to give you an idea of the geography of Michigan, the farthest laboratory away from Detroit is actually 10 hours one direction. So getting to court and getting evidence to court can sometimes be a little bit difficult.

This is a quick photo of these pod storage units. We actually purchased two for our Northville laboratory, which is about 20 minutes outside the city of Detroit, and this is a view from the inside. It's just stacked with evidence coming in from the city of Detroit.

Now we're 21 months in. I hate to tell you, but our DNA turnaround time is 318 days. It has done nothing but get longer. We have large discrepancies from one area of the state to another. On the western side of the state where they have sufficient resources, we are at about a two- to three-month turnaround time, and when we move cases around, because obviously you want to normalize the situation across the state, basically what happens is you get a lot of law enforcement agencies where they were receiving very nice turnaround times of two to three months; now we are looking at 318 days, and the fingers all point towards the city of Detroit. So it does get a little bit difficult there.

In 2009, just to give you an idea, we processed 1,609 cases for biology for the city of Detroit. More than 500 profiles entered into CODIS, and we had 227 associations out of those 500 profiles that went in, 84 of which were the sexual assaults, and I already mentioned that we have 12 new scientists, which will account for about 2,500 to 2,600 cases this coming year.

Basically, what we are finding is that when we took over the Detroit Police Department Crime Laboratory activities, we found out that many things within the Detroit Police Department needed our assistance, and some of them went from collection of evidence and proper handling of evidence to proper submission of evidence, much like Dean was saying. You take a vested interest in how the evidence is collected and how it is submitted because, when you're receiving over 100 cases a day, quality stuff in means quality stuff out, and so we took a big interest in that. And basically what occurred is we had one of our administrative commanders do a tour of their evidence facilities and found 10,559 sexual assault kits in their property room. That was six months ago. As recent as two weeks ago, the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office testified in front of Congress that that number might be as high as 15,000.

A couple of things to point out about those sexual assault kits: They represent all of the kits that they have in storage, much like Dean was saying. We are going through a process right now. We're actually trying to figure out what the status is on each and every one of them, and that is definitely a daunting task.

The other thing to point out is that this isn't an issue of whether they should have been submitted for testing or not. The Detroit Police Department holds that they were all properly investigated and all properly handled, but when you look at the numbers, when they have 2,500 to 3,000 sexual assault kits a year and the Detroit Police Department Crime Laboratory did about 10 percent of that, I think that is a pretty low number for analysis. The kits date back to about 1993, basically.

So what we've decided to do — and this has been kind of working on it for about the past six months — is when you have over 10,000 CSC kits and you're looking at the possibility of actually having to process them, the first thing we did is we actually put together a focus group, stakeholders group, and we decided to take a very broad-based approach to it. Obviously, the Michigan State Police, Wayne County Prosecutor's Office, Detroit Police Department are key members of that group.

We also reached out to the Prosecutors Association of Michigan, federal partners; there are advocacy groups through the Michigan Domestic Violence Prevention and Treatment Board and a whole host of groups to get input on how to handle this particular issue.

Basically, what we did, the first thing, is we process mapped it: How are we going to look at all these kits? What is the process that we are going to go through? We felt that it was really important to have a process because that's the way that you get everybody to adhere to looking at them the same way and not veering from one process to another. And I'll point out, too, that this document is a living document. It changes, it seems like, monthly for sure.

What we have decided to do is … actually, we termed this the “400 Project.” In order to get a scope-of-work project out of this, we have identified with Michigan State University's Center for Statistics. In order to get to a 95 percent confidence interval for being able to predict out what that full 10,559 is going to look like, it would require us to sample a random sample of 400 sexual assault kits. So we're actually in that process right now where we have randomly selected 400 sexual assault kits, and we're going through evaluating all of them, processing them for serology and DNA, and then we'll take that data that we get, give it back to the Michigan State University Center for Statistics, and they will project what the full 10,559 is going to look like.

Basically, what this is going to do is it's going to allow us to create a business plan for trying to garner sufficient funding and resources from the laboratory analysis, the investigative resources, the prosecutorial resources, as well as the advocacy of resources to actually deal with this particular issue, and much of that funding is available through recovery of money as well as NIJ backlog reduction funding.

Much like Dean, we are collecting probably more information than what we'll ever use. Some of it is more just to cover ourselves for questions that might be asked in the future, but it'll help us out in order to project as well as to hopefully answer any questions that might come.

Some of the metrics that we're looking at, we're going to evaluate the cases prior to submitting them for DNA, and we have a team associated with it where we have prosecutors, we have investigators, we have crime victim advocates, and the Prosecutors Association of Michigan is actually looking at each and every one of these cases prior to submission to the laboratory. And this is being done on the initial 400 cases. We may or may not cover that for carrying over to the 10,500 cases, but we're certainly going to do that on the first 400. The reason for that is really an issue of sort of an audit between the DPD laboratory and our laboratory and the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office of what actually needs to be processed because they are saying that they are all investigated properly.

Some of the things we're going to look at are whether they're previously adjudicated, and remember that I said that every one of these cases covers the gamut of every section that the case can actually appear in, whether the suspect was identified previously through means other than DNA, but his or her profile is available in CODIS as an offender. A lot of these are the willingness of the victim to actually prosecute. The advocates are very interested in looking at that part of it. Some very simple things about the prosecutability of the cases: Many of these don't even have police reports associated with them. The only information that we would have is a medical history form that is within the sexual assault kit.

For the laboratory side of things, much like what Dean was mentioning, we're going to be capturing information on how many are positive for the presence of male DNA, how many have a positive male result for the actual STR typing, how many are eligible for CODIS and how many are ultimately identified as an offender within the database, and this will help us to develop our business plan on how much resources and efforts that we need based on where they fall out of the system, based on the type of evidence that we're getting.

Oddly enough, Dean and I didn't talk about our talks ahead of time, but I've got almost the same thing that you had. It's a huge challenge; there is no doubt. And two years ago I would have never anticipated that I was going to be dealing with a project like this, but there are certainly some challenges associated with it. We certainly have very limited resources. We've hired these 10 additional people, but that barely touches the amount of evidence that's coming in.

There's very different viewpoints from one focus group to another, which has been challenging but very interesting. Outsourcing casework, as Dean covered, has its own challenges. Out-of-state law enforcement agencies have very similar issues to Detroit, only the numbers are a little smaller, and by doing this, we're going to be setting a new level of service that hopefully will be duplicated throughout the state, and also with the challenges come some rewards.

I've dealt or built some incredible relationships. What I'm finding is that within the city of Detroit, no matter what your viewpoint is on the situation, whether you're an advocate or with a law enforcement agency or one of the attorneys handling it, they're all an incredibly dedicated and professional group to work with.

And the other thing I wanted to point out is that as we talk about backlogs and we talk about very large numbers — and I know that it'll fall on ears that are sympathetic to this, but let's not forget that each one of those sexual assault kits actually represents an individual, the name and a story, and I think that's an important thing to point out. And, again, it's also an opportunity to make an incredible impact on a very impoverished city right now.

As far as pending legislation, there is one piece of legislation that is pending in front of the state legislature. It is being proposed by Senator Tupac Hunter and it's very different than the legislation that you see some other places, where it's requiring sexual assault kits actually be submitted to the laboratory. This is more for notification type of piece of legislation. It is called the [Sexual] Assault Victims Right[s] Act, and basically, what it does is just keeping the sexual assault victim up to speed on exactly what is going on with his or her case and all the way through the process, from identifying an individual and having samples in CODIS and all that kind of information.

And solutions, much like what Dean was mentioning, there are certainly some IT solutions that can be associated with this, one of them being that we have a lot of different LIM systems and court system, information systems and all that stuff, but they don't talk to each other, and it would be very useful to have a type of system that actually could talk to each other, so that we're not doing quite as much wasted work.

Submission policies are a huge thing, and then, of course, as we move evidence throughout the state, video testimony is a huge endeavor of ours. All seven of our laboratories have video testimony capabilities. It's just a matter of getting them out to the courts. We have already amended the court rules to accept the testimony as testimony. It's just that a lot of defense experts are not accepting of it, and then finally, these CSC kits in the city of Detroit caught us a little bit by surprise, and it would be beneficial to have some sort of a CSC kit tracking system, so that you could actually see where the backlog is going to be before it actually gets to numbers that are outside of concept.

And then that's my contact information. Thank you very much.

[Applause.]

Joseph L. Peterson: Thank you, Jeff, and thanks to all the panelists.

I would like to conclude with a brief overview of what we're in the process of doing in Los Angeles, trying to describe and evaluate and tabulate the results of the testing that's being done of this, that's being outsourced at this time.

As Dean said, that we had around 11,000 or more backlog kits combining both the Los Angeles Police Department and the Sheriff's Department back in, I think, November 1, 2008. The reasons for the backlog — and I use the term advisedly, as Dean is shooting looks at me, but it's truly, the backlog, the responsibility is with the detective, with the investigator who failed to request an analysis. So that the backlog wasn't really in the laboratory, it was at that stage at the property room preceding submission of that evidence to the laboratory, and I think the work that Kevin has done illustrates that as well.

A decision was made by the sheriff and by the chief in Los Angeles Police Department to test all the backlog kits and to — because of resource limitations — to outsource that, the testing, to these labs, plus I forgot Cal DOJ, and directed to these labs in varying amounts depending upon contracts that each of the departments and agencies worked with.

Our objectives in our study, as we received NIJ funding to undertake this evaluation, we wanted to start first with an evaluation of the sexual assault literature, and there is considerable literature there. It's mostly social science. These are studies that, over the last 30 years, have appeared in various criminological and criminal justice journals, but they tell us a lot, and I'll talk some about that, too.

Another objective was to sample and describe and evaluate the results of the tests being performed by these private testing laboratories. What were the results, in fact? What were the primary characteristics of these outsourced cases? And this next point is a real challenge, is to determine the investigative and judicial outcomes of these cases.

Because of limitations with laboratory LIM systems and just our criminal justice system, it's very difficult to track down and find out the numbers of these cases that led to an arrest or some sort of adjudication in the courts. The audit that the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department certainly assisted us in moving toward that goal, but that is a tremendous challenge for us, but we felt that that was one question we wanted to try to answer: “Well, what was the outcome of these cases?”

And the next point, we wanted to compare the judicial outcomes once these backlog cases have been examined. What is the backlog; what is the outcomes of those cases versus cases where testing was immediate — that these kits had not been backlogged, they had been examined perhaps in six months, perhaps nine months, the normal turnaround time in those laboratories — did we see a different outcome in those cases; and then lastly, what were the outcomes in those cases where there was no testing done at all? Were there substantial and identified differences in these three groups of cases?

And then, as has been discussed, too, by Dean and Jeff, can we help to develop future prioritization criteria; that is, should it just be the decision of the detective or should it be a collaboration between the detective and the laboratory? Should we involve the prosecutor as well, since the prosecutor's wishes and particularly their idea of the convictability of a given case looms large in this whole operation of what is done in the way of forensic testing? So we can't disregard that.

What we've found looking at the literature, what indicates those cases that result in arrest and conviction — this is really prior to the work we're doing right now — but looking at that literature — and those of you who are familiar with Violence Against Women, the journal and other journals — weapon, was there a weapon in use in that case, and that is a key factor in determining the predicted success of that case leading to an arrest and leading to a conviction.

Why? I think it has something to do with the perceived seriousness of the case on the part of the investigator, just as physical injuries suffered by the victim, not to mention the psychological and some, of course, physical trauma with respect to the sexual assault, but was there documentable injuries that could be photographed? I t could be very clear to the individuals in charge, the investigators, the prosecutors, the courts, as to the gravity or the seriousness of the offense.

Was there penetration? Some of these studies have tried to determine that. Some of it was self report on the part of the victim. Others was based on scientific evidence through — and that was through corroboration through scientific evidence that there was a finding of semen.

Was there a sexual assault kit taken? Even though there wasn't an analysis of the kit, there are several studies that have shown that cases in which the victim went to the hospital, had a sexual assault kit taken, was more likely to result in an arrest and prosecution and conviction than others. If I may interpret that, it's another indication to the investigator that this is a real case, this is a serious case. The victim is doing everything she can to further the interests of the investigation, and that is one indication, once again, even without the analysis of the evidence, the fact that she went through that process.

And the value, interesting enough, of the kit varied inversely with the prosecutor's assessment of credibility; that is, the value of the kit seemed to be greater where the credibility of the victim was questionable or was lower; that is, the physical evidence piece of it could buttress that case and could elevate the overall credibility of the case, if you will.

So there are some very interesting social demographic dimensions to this that I personally feel that the crime laboratories need to be in touch with in terms of evaluating the case and valuating the evidence when it comes in and making a decision whether this case is going to be investigated and examined or not.

We found in other … I think the survey work that the sheriff's department did … that, largely, these backlog cases were situations where there was a reluctance on the part of the investigators to request an analysis. Either they didn't think it was necessary, they were concerned about the limited resources in the lab or perhaps a combination of those things.

In a high percentage of these cases, victims and assailants have known associations. They're either in a dating relationship, they're family members, they're intimates, they're acquaintances of some sort. This other NIJ study that we just finished, we found that in a random sample of rape cases in five jurisdictions, 80 percent of the victims knew their assailant, 80 percent. These were cases where there was an investigation that included both, both where physical evidence was gathered and was not. So you have to look at that issue as well.

There are many claims of consensual intercourse. Detectives may conclude that a rape did not occur. The victim may be uncooperative and/or judged not credible, and prosecutors declined to file charges.

This OCJP form in California is the form that's filled out when the victim is examined and the sexual assault kit is taken, and what we're trying to do is incorporate some of these facts and looking at ultimately what were the test results. Once the testing of the evidence is done, can we say something about where that evidence originated from the victim? Is the DNA evidence or other physical evidence recovered from different portions of the victim's body typically more valuable than others? And most of these are from victims. Occasionally, they are from suspects, these kits are taken, but we hope to be able to say something also about that.

We're going to be tabulating the number of cases in which semen was identified, where DNA was identified, the male profile determined, those that were uploaded into Cal DNA databank and CODIS, as well as hits in cases that may associate this person with other incidents that he may have participated in.

I've talked with Ken and Larry Blanton and others that, you know, the serial acquaintance rapist — is there such a phenomenon? Can we document that — can we truly associate this person who maybe wasn't prosecuted in this particular case, but if it could be shown that this individual was associated with other cases of this type, the prosecutor might determine to proceed against that individual? We are looking at, of course, CODIS information and CODIS hits.

Just real quickly, in our NIJ study, this was a part from this particular study. One thing of interest: We looked at the fraction of cases of rapes in which evidence was collected, submitted and examined. It was collected in 64 percent of these rape cases. It was submitted to a crime laboratory in 32 percent, and it was actually examined in 19 percent. I think that that again speaks to these issues that Kevin Strom and others have looked at, at this. We need to look at this process from the point at which the evidence is gathered, when it's submitted and when it was examined and the reasons for that.

So it's a complex process, and I don't need to tell you all that, but I think many of these social science organizational determinants are things that the crime lab community are going to have to come to grips with and try to incorporate some of these factors into their decision-making.

Thank you very much.

[Applause.]

Kristina Rose: Welcome, everyone. We certainly did not expect to have so many people in this panel, the very last panel of the last day of the conference. We were wondering how we were going to be able to talk people into coming. This is wonderful. So thanks to all of you for being here.

We have requested more chairs. We don’t know how many they’ll give us because of the fire code restrictions, so we’ll bring in as many as we can.

My name is Kristina Rose. I’m the Deputy Director at the National institute of Justice, and I am lucky enough to have oversight over the Office of Investigative and Forensic Sciences and work very closely with its director, Mike Sheppo, who some of you may know.

Now I’m not a subject matter expert in forensics, but probably like many of you, I have a very, very strong interest in the research and the policy issues, especially in terms of the new advances in the field and learning more about the advances in terms of using the power of DNA to both solve crimes and exonerate innocent folks. Now you may have noticed in looking at who we have presenting here today that we don’t have a researcher on the panel. Now some of the more scientific aspects around familial searching were discussed in a panel earlier in the week by some of our forensic scien[tists] . So what I would like to do with this panel because there’s not a lot of research, a lot of research evidence — as we heard the attorney general and the assistant attorney general talking about — to provide the scientific underpinnings in terms of “Does this work? What is the impact of familial searching?” We don’t have a lot of that, so I’d like to use this panel as an opportunity to think about the research questions, to help inform us, to help inform our research agenda around this particular issue. We often, before we have research on a particular criminal justice topic, we end up relying so much on anecdotal evidence, and it’s not enough. It’s not good enough anymore. So, it’s very, very important to us to develop strong evidence for different approaches that the criminal justice system takes part in.

Now — I’ll just come out and say it — this is a controversial issue. We have folks here that are going to present both sides of the issue. And for the record, I want to say that NIJ does not have a particular position, but our job here is to present to you both the benefits of this type of approach as well as the concerns with this practice. I’d like to just mention a couple of the different research questions that we have been thinking about that I’d like you to think about as you listen to these presentations. So for example: What is the scope of the impact of a policy change to using familial searching? And how are law enforcement and crime labs poised to absorb the investigations that result from this kind of searching? And beyond the anecdotal information we have on familial searching, how successful is it really? For example, what is the cost-benefit analysis? And I think in this particular case, that’s a very important question to be contemplating. What about the structure of families where there is no bio logical link — families that are formed by fostering or adoption or other means? And when should we use this kind of searching? And which crimes should we be using it for? What is the impact of a familial searching policy on police and community relations? And what are the implications of the disproportionate impact on minority populations? I think that these are all important questions to consider.

So I’m going to introduce our panelists here. We have Mitch Morrissey who is the District Attorney in Denver, Colorado. We have Steve Siegel who works with Mitch, and they are going to be co-presenting. Steve is the Director of the Special Programs Unit at the Denver DA’s office. And we’re very pleased to have Steve Mercer with us. He is the Chief Attorney of the Forensics Division at the Maryland Office of the Public Defender. And they have presented before; they are used to presenting together. But I would say, before I turn it over to Mitch to get us started, is that because this is a very controversial issue and because the discussions around this issue can get quite heated, I would like to ask the audience members, because we will be leaving a significant amount of time for questions, to remain respectful of each others’ positions and, as the moderator and looking at all these faces in here looking at me, I am very cognizant of keeping things respectful of the different opinions that may be expressed here today. Jolene [Hernon]?

Jolene Hernon: [Inaudible]

Rose: Oh my goodness. Okay, that’s terrific. Thank you. Great. Thank you very much for indulging me. And I’ll turn this over to Mitch Morrissey.

Mitch Morrissey: Kris, thank you. We know how to draw a crowd, huh? I have been a prosecutor for 30 years in Denver, Colorado. I’m the elected District Attorney there. So I’m used to going first, and then Steven will follow me.

[Laughter]

That’s the way it works in court, right, Steven? But we are extremely excited to see that this topic has brought this kind of audience to the meeting. We were concerned about it being the last part of the day, that type of thing. So we appreciate you being here. We talk about DNA; obviously very important. Many of you work with DNA, and I always, when I talk to my legislature or policy — people that set policy around DNA — I always bring this up, that 90 percent of the crimes we solve with DNA: violent crimes against women in our country. The 10 percent that are left, we’re talking about primarily children. Now we’ve expanded that. We’ve changed that a little bit because now we use DNA with property crimes and those types of things. But again, this is a statistic that throughout the history of DNA’s use in forensics in the United States is a very important thing to keep in mind. So when we talk about familial searching — and those of you that are in law enforcement that have investigated a serial murder or serial rape case will understand — when we’re talking about a lead based on science, you’ll understand the kinds of leads that you have to run down as an investigator on a serial rape/serial murder case. Often times the anonymous phone call, the Crimestoppers tip, the ex-girlfriend that thinks her boyfriend looked like the composite drawing that you have. Those are the kind[s] of leads that law enforcement is used to running down in those kinds of situations. So why is familial searching important to law enforcement? It saves them time. It saves them money, and it saves lives. Steve is going to also address us, and he has a role in this presentation. Go ahead, Steve.

Steve Siegel: I’m the Steve [who] sits in between Mitch and Steven. You know, it’s important as we talk about this forensic tool and this law enforcement tool, that we don’t forget the concept that this all relates to individuals who have been through the worst experiences probably of their lives. And so, why is familial searching, if this was a room full of victim advocates and we were asking the question of who’s in favor and who’s not, it wouldn’t be a very controversial group. And the reason is because it provides hope to crime victims. Particularly, we’re talking about cold cases where we’re looking for answers that they thought may not come, or for that matter, in the case of exonerations, where victims really want to know who committed the crime, not just that anybody is being punished. And then finally, it promotes justice. Which is really, if you do research and research has been done on what crime victims are looking for, that’s really the number one issue that comes up is they want justice in the matter that they suffered. And just to briefly review the impact that victims are facing: It begins with the physical impact of the crime, goes on to the financial and emotional aspects of the crime, which we’ll talk about a little bit later, but there’s also the social aspects of how the community views crime victims and how they view crime victims whose cases have never been solved. And then finally there’s that aspect of the spiritual part of the impact of crime on folks who are saying if this happened to me, how could my belief in God or my belief in my faith be held up? So it’s important to put all of this in the context of the human impacts on crime victims.

Morrissey: We primarily learned about familial searching in the U.K. And Steven and I have been debating for some time about the use of familial searching in the United States. And really, until California got involved in doing familial searching, there really was not a critical success in the United States where familial searching was involved. That changed about a year ago when they caught the Grim Sleeper. Now it’s important to keep in mind the Grim Sleeper was the most active serial murderer west of the Mississippi for the last 30 years.

[Audio from video being shown]

Reporter: Police in Los Angeles today announced the arrest of a retired auto mechanic they say haunted the city for a quarter century. The serial killer, who allegedly preyed on the weak … [Inaudible]

Morrissey: So remember, we’re talking about a scientifically based lead that then needs to be turned over to law enforcement for a conventional investigation to take place. Without the teamwork that was talked about by that expert from whatever channel, this isn’t going to work. So if your law enforcement is not committed to doing this in a legal, constitutional way that protects peoples’ privacy, then it’s probably not something that you should engage in, in your community. Like I said, we went to the U.K. U.K. has been doing familial searching for some period of time. This is one of the cases that they were successful in.

[Inaudible audio from video being shown]

Morrissey: And the only revision to that statement I would make is that it’s a state-by-state process. Because if you know the CODIS system, you know that this data is primarily there, and the states control it with their state statutes.

So let me explain to you — what happened was we went to the U.K. in 2006. We were lucky enough to be able to learn about their familial search policy. We came back to the United States; we were excited about it. We contacted the FBI — thought that they would be the place to do this kind of investigation. And they really weren’t interested at that point in doing it. I’m going to move through this, so don’t watch too close[ly] because you might get carsick.

And so then we started to deal with California on some issues we had with them on partial matches. I went out and met with Attorney General Jerry Brown, and Jerry Brown was at first reluctant, and then eventually California did a familial search policy and began familial searching. And their first success was the Grim Sleeper case.

But we looked to the U.K. about what their success rate was. They, to date, have done 122 serious crime investigations, and about 19 percent of the time, they have been able to catch the individual out of that; so 32 out of 122. Now some of the people they were able to identify out of the 122 that were on their list got captured through other means. So they had them on their list. They had a better success rate than that. Eventually they would have gotten around to doing a familial search. These are the individuals that they have captured. You can see: Mostly male; all white. A couple of females; they’re white. And they are — been convicted of abandoning children. Familial searching can help you do that, too. So if you have a baby that has been abandoned or killed, you can’t identify their mother or father, you can use familial searching, and they have had success with that with the two women that are up there. So they have solved 14 murders, 48 rapes, the three child abandonments that I talked about, and they have successfully exonerated individuals with DNA and gotten to the individual that left the DNA in the murders in four different occasions using familial searching.

So we go to the United States — I talked to you a little bit about this — in Denver. We were able to go to the UK and study their program, talked to the FBI, eventually worked with the California Attorney General’s Office on a familial search program there, which, basically, was independent of ours. They did their own thing. They have the third largest DNA database on the planet, so they went to work, developed their own software and had [the] success that I talked about. They have since had another success out of Santa Cruz. They caught a young man through a familial search because his father was in the database on a rape case.

So, we were there in Denver. We have a forensic lab there. We have a small, local DNA database. We decided that we would develop a software; we did that. And we would run a familial search in a research setting where we would take all our forensic unknowns in Denver and run them against all of our known samples that we had. We were successful in getting five cases where we had an over 90 percent likelihood ratio that we had the relative of the person we were interested in, in our case in our database. We ran Y-STR testing when they were males to show they had the same Y-STR type. And eventually our state policy includes the Y-STR testing for, not necessarily confirmation, but if you have an individual that your software is telling you may have a high likelihood of relatedness and they don’t have the same Y chromosome, they’re not related males. And that ends your lead. And the way we have it set up in Colorado, we never even get the name of the individual until we’re past this process.

This is one of the examples; this is an individual that was in our database. He was a known. This is from our department of corrections and any of you interested in him can go on the Internet and pull him up through the Colorado DOC site. You can see that he is a frequent flyer for us — a habitual criminal in Denver. It was a burglary case; we had an earpiece, had earwax on it, had a DNA profile. Our software told us there was a 90 percent likelihood that this was the father of the individual we were looking for. So we ran the Y-STRs — we got the confirmation they had the same Y-STR type. So we built a family tree. This was his wife. This is his family. These are his sons. And we had to eliminate his sons — well the first one was in penitentiary at the time of our burglary. He had a good alibi. The second one was in the penitentiary also at the time of our burglary. Same alibi, probably not the same cell. Third one was in the penitentiary at the time we were doing our investigation, but was not in the penitentiary at the time of our burglary, which concerned us. Because we had an all-felons statute in our state, and if you have an all-felons statute, somebody is in your penitentiary, they should be in your DNA database, and we should have gotten a CODIS hit. Remember, this is a technique you utilize when you have a DNA profile, you’ve run it in the database, and you don’t get a match. We’d run this in the database, and we didn’t get a match on somebody that was in the penitentiary — potential problem. We called them. They said, “We’ve got a backlog. We haven’t run him yet.” We said, “Can you move him up the waiting list?” They said, “Yes.” In two weeks we had a CODIS hit. We got to the person that left the earwax on the earpiece in the burglary. Now the problem was somebody else left some earwax on that earpiece. There’s a DNA profile there that we haven’t been able to identify, so we have not brought those charges. But we were successful in getting back to the individual.

So we developed the software, and it cost us about $50,000 to do that, and that included buying this very highly technical laptop that Gregg LaBerge can explain to you how it works. Because I really don’t know; I just paid the bill for it. So what we decided then [was] that we would approach our state and talk about doing familial searching in Colorado. And the only way you can do that when you’re working with the state lab is [if] they have a policy. So we first approached the Department of Public Safety and our Attorney General to talk about familial searching and creating a state policy that would allow our lab to do this work. And we were successful at that, and about a year after we had our first meeting — because lawyers got involved in this policy it took us a year to get it done — we got that policy then. We ran it by our governor, and we sat down with the leaders of our legislature and explained to them what we were doing because we didn’t want anybody taken by surprise by the fact that Colorado was going to start doing familial searching. Remember, 85 percent of your CODIS hits happen within your state. So it’s very important that if you’re going to do this, that you do it within your state. Most of the criminals in my jurisdiction stay in my jurisdiction.

We determined, based on our statute, that we didn’t need to go to the legislature and actually change our statute. We were keenly aware of the privacy issues surrounding DNA, surrounding DNA databasing and surrounding familial searching. We had studied that in the U.K. We wanted to make sure that we struck the right balance between protecting peoples’ privacy and going after violent criminals where we had a DNA profile but no match in the DNA database. In Colorado, we have an arrestee statute and a convicted felon statute, so we use[d] it in both instances. California, their familial search policy does not include their arrestees in their statute. And the one thing we don’t do — like that lady that knocked on the lady’s door in the UK — we don’t knock on peoples’ doors. In fact, our policy says the last thing you do, unless you have exigent circumstances, is contact any member of the family. In my state, if you contact a serial murderer’s family, you may very well have to extradite the serial murderer or serial rapist out of some other country or some other state. We’re not in the business of tipping people off. But also, we do this to protect individuals.

I showed you the example of just one way that we research these family trees. And that is by using the Internet and using the law enforcement information that we have. But contacting the family is just not something that we do because of a number of reasons. And this just [lies] out in general what our policy requires. The DA or the chief of police has to request it. It has to be an unsolved case where the leads have been exhausted. Has to be a full STR profile — in Colorado that’s 13 loci. Got to conduct Y-STR testing when it’s appropriate; obviously, if a woman’s involved, mitochondrial DNA could help you. And then you can see where you use those profiles. The requesting agency then does the follow-up investigation, but the name is not turned over to them until they have gone through a specific training on how to conduct these follow-up investigations without violating anybody’s rights.

So our first test with the state lab was 2,000 forensic unknowns — again this is our research — against 80,000. We have far more than 80,000 now in our database — but at the time, this is what we had in the Colorado DNA database — and we have been able to, in 10 separate cases, get back to the individual that left the DNA at the crime scene through a familial search in that database. Steve, you wanted to talk about this?

Siegel: Mitch alluded to the point that, first of all, there’s a difference for me between being passionate about this kind of work and being zealo[us] about the work where you ignore a lot of the things that make it happen the right way.

We knew that privacy and information quality was of the highest regard in doing the policy the right way. I’m fortunate to serve on the Global Justice Information Sharing Initiative, which is a part of the U.S. Department of Justice, and sit particularly on the Privacy and Information Quality Working Group. We submitted our Colorado policy to them and their experts — a multidisciplinary group including the defense bar — and asked them to go over it with a fine-toothed comb and advise us the best way that we can put privacy protections into place. We’re in the process of implementing that at the state level.

In addition, next week here in Washington, we’ll be discussing how to release a national document to advise other states around the United States about how to best protect the privacy rights and the information quality that is developed through these programs. And as we do that here and we talk about the individual needs of victims, it’s really important to talk about the multidisciplinary aspects of serving these crime victims. We talked about the impacts a little bit earlier, and in this case, we look at the unique needs of the victims and begin to serve them through this partnership, which includes the Denver Police Department, the Denver Police Department laboratory, their victim assistance unit, the Denver District Attorney’s Office, victim advocates and prosecutors and investigators and the use of community agencies to address needs and support the victims as they go through this.

One of the things that has had to be a policy that will be adjusted probably in most states across the United States is the availability of crime victim compensation, particularly for mental health. In most cases, because these are older cases, it would come outside of the window of opportunity for those support services. In this case, in the interest of justice, that’s waived so that crime victims who need that extra support of mental health services have availability.

Morrissey: So the cost is something we always get asked about. If you’re tracking California’s cost, it costs a lot more than our cost. They have a bureaucracy around their familial searching that includes a lot of people sitting down and meeting and talking and discussing things. We don’t quite do that, and it doesn’t cost us nearly as much as it costs them to do familial searching. So if you’re a small state, and you have about 20 candidates in your Y-STR pool, it costs you about $2,500 to run those 20 Y-STR tests, and then $7,000 if you had about 200 Y-STR testings. Remember, we are talking about where most of the cost is handled here. You’ve already run the crime scene profile, right? Because you wanted to run it in the national database. Your state has invested millions and millions of dollars in this state database, — in the national database. You’ve already created that; you’ve got that. You can run familial searching in the database; doesn’t matter how big it is. We could do, with our software, the national DNA database in three seconds. So it’s just a matter of you’ve paid for the DNA testing in your crime scene case. You’ve paid for this database. So we’re talking about you build a Porsche; are you going to drive it like a Pinto, or are you going to drive it like a Porsche? Familial searching helps you drive this database that our country has invested millions of dollars in the way it should; it makes it much more efficient. Now remember, the follow-up investigation is going to cost you money. But those are the guys that are running down those anonymous tips — the bad ex-girlfriend that says he looks like the composite — they’re already there; they’re already paying the overtime. So, that’s it.

I’m not going to talk to you a lot about Y-STR testing. You guys are all scientists; you should know about that — that you inherit that from your father. You son will have the same Y type, and that’s why we are able to use that as a confirmation test. When you have women, you have the mitochondrial DNA, and you can do the same thing.

This is the first conviction based on familial searching in the United States; again we had the 90 percent likelihood in this case. Y-STR match. It was a car thief that was in our database. We did his family. You can see here the sharing is in yellow. Eighteen of the 26 they shared. And our software not only looks for sharing but it also looks at how rare the things they share are in the U.S. population. We got to his brother who left blood in the car break-ins. Again, this was our research; it’s not a serial rape or murder case. But we did say we would charge anybody that we solved a case in. Car break-ins: the first familial search conviction in the United States.

These are the states that we’ve reached out to and offered our software free of charge. And I’ll tell you, it’s been extremely hard to give something away for free in this country. We reached out to these states, and you can see the kinds of individuals that they were interested in catching at the time. And I’m proud to say that Virginia took us up on our offer. And we gave them our database two days after Christmas last year, and within 90 days they had validated it. They had a protocol that was in place with a policy signed by their governor, and they started doing casework with familial searching. Exonerations, were talked about with Steve.

[Inaudible audio from video being shown]

Morrissey: So in the first 212 exonerations in this country, 81 of the individuals responsible for the DNA were in the database. That leaves you an awful lot of cold cases out there where you have the DNA that doesn’t match anybody in the database. And anybody that works with exonerations, and I have a program in my office that does just that, an exoneration is truly an exoneration when you catch the individual that is responsible for the crime. If you come from a small community, the community believes the guy got off on some kind of a technicality. But when you catch the real person and hold them responsible for the rapes and murders and the types of things we’re talking about here today, that’s truly an exoneration. Those individuals should be entitled to that, along with those families and those rape victims that are waiting for answers.

Siegel:So, quickly, to keep within the time frame, first of all, I want to say if any of you are from outside the Beltway, and you wanted to know about the power of NIJ, the Director and the Deputy Director here, and walls move.

So what about our victims? I think those of you who are in the science know about this: We have post-traumatic stress disorder on the books, and that our goal, the criminal justice goal and not just the prosecutor’s office, is to minimize these traumatic situations both at the time of the incident and in cold case situations as people live with this. And post-traumatic stress disorder is, as we have seen, through both criminal victimization and the military, something that is an epidemic in our country and causes great loss. Here’s another topic for research: Just what is the loss to our country in terms of productivity of this? This is some of the research that was done in Canada. And the point that I want to make is that closing out a case will not always get rid of that pain, but from a victim’s perspective, closing that case is always their number-one priority. And so it’s the trigger to the continuation of healing. I’ll skip that one.

[Inaudible audio from video being shown]

Morrissey: That’s one of the mothers of the victim that waited years in the Grim Sleeper situation. Now remember the Grim Sleeper has not gone to trial. So he has not been convicted of anything. But it was the leads that got them to him so he could be charged with these homicides.

Siegel: We switch to the final slide: The former director of NIJ’s wife, Susan Herman, has a book out that’s called Parallel Justice [for Victims of Crime]. And in it she speaks about the commonalities between justice from the perspective of the offender and justice from the perspective of the victim. And her premise is that there is a great deal of commonality, and that commonality is families want the right person in jail, and they want timely justice. And I think that’s what this is about. And I’ll leave that last one to Mitch.

Morrissey: So we know this is not a scientific issue. We’ve proved it works. The U.K. has proved it works; California has proved it works. Really, in the United States, it’s a question of policy. So we talked to the governors two weeks ago, their association. On Monday I talked to the attorney generals and their national association in Chicago, and I just want to thank you for being here today. And I will turn it over to Mr. Mercer at this time.

[Applause]

Stephen Mercer: Good afternoon. The message may be that Steve just gave you — he was talking about justice from the perspective of the victim — and the implication may be that as an attorney with a public defender who has represented criminals over the course of my career, persons charged with crimes, people wrongfully convicted of crimes, that I’m going to be talking about justice from the perspective of a criminal defendant. That’s not the case. I’m here to talk about justice from everyone’s perspective, and in particular your perspective.

Now, let me say this first: You know you’re at a forensics conference when the prosecutor is getting excited about earwax. And we’ve heard about some of the successes of familial searching. But understand something: There [are] more failures than successes. And, really, most of you are scientists here; most of you have a stake in your CODIS database. You value that CODIS database. It’s important to your mission. You are careful about the profiles you upload; you’re careful about the information that you derive from it. You wouldn’t want to do anything to imperil the primary mission of the CODIS database. Now, the question you have to ask yourself: “Is this tireless advocacy for the use of familial searching to solve crimes like vehicle break-ins the sort of technique that you want to employ if it can imperil the primary mission of your CODIS database?” It can. And in two states, in Maryland and D.C., the legislatures have banned familial searching because of concerns that have not really been fully discussed yet, but that I’m charged with the duty to do so. And, I share these concerns with you understanding that there may be some robust disagreement about the issues that are implicated, the larger policy issues that are implicated by the technique of familial searching. But you as stakeholders in the CODIS system have to understand that these issues are real, and that they can — the technique of familial searching — implicates important values that, if threatened, could result in a loss of support for the CODIS database.

So, my primary point is that the expansion of DNA databanks to target innocent people who are largely defined by their race and class for lifelong genetic surveillance is a terribly misguided policy that vastly overshadows the handpicked successes that you have heard about today. And, so for about 10 minutes I just want to talk with you about why familial searching of DNA databanks is a particularly corrosive form of genetic surveillance. And then, second, I have a brief PowerPoint to share with you about the experience in Maryland and D.C. that resulted in a ban, an express ban, on the technique of familial searching of DNA databanks, and how those experience[s] suggest that familial expansion may imperil your core mission of the CODIS database. We should leave plenty of time for questions after the fact.

The expansion of DNA databanks through the technique of familial searching is bad policy for three main reasons. First, the profound racial justice implications of using a technology that has the effect of putting under genetic surveillance individuals primarily defined by race and class. Second, by targeting innocent family members for genetic surveillance, familial searching undermines the original justification for DNA databanks and devalues fundamental principles central to our democracy. And third, familial searching amplifies the concern about future abuses of DNA databanks because it sets the precedent for mining of the biological samples for additional information that are linked to the DNA profile stored in the databank. Since most of you are scientists and technical, I trust [that] you understand that, but I’ll talk more about that as I go on.

But we have to first recognize that the larger context that these considerations have to be viewed in — we live in a democracy that places a high value on certain principles that we deem essential to a society that not only functions, but flourishes. The equality of individuals regardless of race or economic status; the autonomy of each person; the dignity of every individual; an individual’s right to privacy and control of their home, person, and information. A defining feature of our democracy, from its inception, has been to safeguard these values against the police power of the state. From the beginning, our democracy has recognized that the cost of catching a criminal is more than just the expense of deploying the police or some new technology; rather we must assess the impact of the particular use of a police power on the rights of every man.

Look, if all we are going to do is talk about individual cases solved through the exercise of police power, then we can just end the conversation now. Let’s scrap the fourth amendment and any reasonable expectation of privacy. Walking down the street will become like boarding an airplane; subject to a touch and feel for any reason or no reason. You home can be intruded at any time of day or night. There doesn’t have to be any reason to stop you in your car and to search it and you from bumper to bumper. Your e-mail can be read; your phone calls listened to; your financial and medical records freely accessed by the government. Your location is known at all times: the Internet sites you visit, the brick-and-mortar stores you patronize. No doubt this will solve many crimes, and at the same time exonerate many individuals because any time evidence points towards one person, it points away from another. And who would complain. After all, if you’re not doing anything wrong, what do you have to fear from police surveillance or searches and seizures that don’t require any reasonable basis? Won’t you thank the police for clearing you of a crime, eliminating you as a suspect? Won’t you be grateful to the state for protecting you, keeping your streets safe and clear of criminals? Even if it means that by seeking help from the police, say a rape victim, your DNA was put into a DNA databank, and you became a genetic informant of another family member because the local database was searched in future cases for family members.

Well, if your answer is yes to any of these questions, I have a suggestion: Move to Russia, China, Iran. Note to self, however: There’s crime in these police states, too. If your answer is no, then you appreciate on some basic, gut level that when individuals like you lack equality, autonomy and control over your home, person and information, then our democracy will never fulfill its great ideals. Face it; there are values that we place higher than just catching a bad guy or girl. This isn’t a discussion about catching the Grim Sleeper, the Stiletto Shoe Rapist, the BTK Killer or any other horrible person. It is about the larger question of how our society should go about solving the inevitable crimes that will occur to innocent victims without sacrificing the values that we cherish and deem essential to the ideals of our democracy. And we are most vulnerable to sacrificing these values when new technology mesmerizes us into thinking there is really nothing at stake.

That’s wrong when we talk about familial searching. Here’s why. The advocates of familial searching want you to believe that I am advancing the privacy interests of criminals who leave their DNA at a crime scene. Wrong. I do not advocate that a person possesses an expectation of privacy in genetic material abandoned at a crime scene. I am here to speak to you about your privacy interests that are seriously implicated by the latest advances in DNA and technology euphemistically called familial searching. In this regard, I feel on safe ground because I trust most of you are not serial-murderers-slash-forensic-scientists. I recognize that it’s nearly treason not to embrace every exciting advance in crime-fighting technology. But remember what you learned at an early age: Beware of bewilderment. Approach with caution new forms of catching criminals that involve the use of technology, like familial searching of DNA databanks that have raced ahead of the law’s ability to conceptualize the privacy interests implicated. To better understand what is at stake, consider this example: In my first face-off with Mitch, on the news magazine 60 Minutes, that catapulted him to national spokesman for familial searching of DNA databanks —

[Laughter]

Morrissey: Thank you, Stephen.

Mercer: — although I don’t think the case that caused the FBI to change their interim policy was solved through familial searching — so it catapulted him to being national spokesman, and me out of the law firm I worked at.

[Laughter]

Mercer: He compared the familial searching of DNA databanks to the police having a partial license plate number from a getaway car. The police would run down the partial plate number in the MVA databank winnow down the hits with any other identification information and then go off to investigate the smaller pool of possible suspects; a safe, relatively harmless technique that doesn’t seem to offend anyone’s sense of privacy. But it’s a false analogy to familial searching. Why? Because of two main reasons: First, DNA is not a license plate. It’s information-rich biological material. Who am I telling that to? It’s the blueprint of a person, and we learn more about it every day. And that information is not always flattering or something that you want to share at your neighborhood cocktail party. Not a day goes by without another news story about how a person’s DNA influences physical health, propensity for disease, substance abuse, mental illness, athletic ability, being straight or gay, propensity to get divorced, married, act impulsively and to even become a criminal. The list is as long as the human condition. Indeed, theNew York Times ran a story earlier this week entitled “Genetic Basis for Crime: A New Look” that discussed the turnaround evident at this very conference of the role that some say genes play in crime.

It is a safe bet that in the not-too-distant future — I predict 5 to 10 years at the most — there will be a genetic profile for propensity for criminal behavior. Right or wrong? Now I think it will be wrong, but it will exist, followed by an inevitable push to conduct research of law enforcement DNA databanks to identify family members who might benefit from “intervention.” And to those of you who say, “No, there is a firewall between the DNA profile and the biological sample it is derived from,” guess again. There used to be. Now, with familial searching, in the name of advancing privacy, what is happening? We’re going back to the biological sample and mining it for additional data. What’s next?

Second, it’s a false analogy, because not everyone is in a DNA databank. Instead, the racial biases and prejudices that have permeated our criminal justice system for hundreds of years have been carried forward in the composition of the DNA databanks. Racial minorities, in particular blacks and Hispanics, make up a disproportionate amount of profiles in the database. This disparity is further amplified by adding profiles of persons who have been merely arrested and not convicted of a crime. That’s the short history of DNA databases: Constant expansion, largely along [the] lines of race and class. Now, here’s the key point, and I credit Erin Murphy with taking this analogy [of] the license plate even further in her article “Relative Doubt: Familial Searching of DNA Databanks.” Reverse this analogy if you want to have an understanding of what is at stake in terms of privacy.

What if not everyone had to have a license plate? What if we limited license plates to just those persons who committed traffic offenses and their family members, but it just so happened that the effect of whatever criteria we relied upon meant that primarily poor blacks and Hispanics had to have license plates. Would we take comfort in our zeal to combat the carnage of traffic crimes? Or would we be somewhat uncomfortable that we have placed under surveillance a group of people largely defined by race and class? Is that equality? Does that further the ideal of our democracy? Does it stigmatize an already historically disfavored group in our society?

This last point is critical. Because while the proponents of familial searching say that privacy is safeguarded or that there’s no search under the fourth amendment or that police officers don’t go knocking on doors, what is ignored is the obvious. It’s the surveillance itself that is the injury. The realization that one is a member of a group defined by race and class that is effectively in a law enforcement DNA database without having committed any crime is a powerful stigma that profoundly impacts upon one’s sense of worth and ability to participate in a democracy. Familial searching is a great threat to our democracy for these reasons, and however well-intentioned — and I don’t doubt the good faith of my opponents — but however well-intentioned the advocates for it may be, the effect of implementing such a policy is a dangerous precedent.

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to convey this message to the Maryland legislature in 2008 and the D.C. council in 2009. Both legislative bodies banned the practice of familial searching. Here’s what it means for CODIS. So I want to sort of take you into the legislative arena, because, not unlike here, you have advocates and you have opponents. And before the Maryland legislature, the governor appeared — it was a signature effort to expand the DNA database. The attorney general was present. The superintendent of the state police [was] present. These were the heavy hitters. And their basic argument [was] more is better. It’s an efficiency argument: We’ll catch more criminals. We want more DNA. Familial searching is just another way to expand the database. And of course the privacy interests are acknowledged but they’re minimized by suggesting that the privacy interest implicated is merely the taking of the DNA itself, the buckle swab, or the police knocking on someone’s door if it’s a familial search, and that unbalanced, the minimal intrusion is outweighed by the strong governmental interest of solving crime.

Well, that didn’t work insofar as the extent of the expansion that was sought. The governor wanted to have expansion to a broad set of arrestees, and that was scaled back to just a narrower class of arrestees, and in that context, the Maryland legislature banned familial searching. Why? Because there was a political base that actually galvanized around this issue. Now, you know, the history of DNA database expansion has basically been one that has been met with very little, if any, opposition or much public debate. That’s different with familial searching, and as CODIS folks you need to understand that. Because there was a political family that did form around this issue. And the reasons involved the racial justice implications, the abandonment of the original justification for including people in the law enforcement database, the fourth amendment concerns about privacy and really, frankly, the cost-benefit analysis, too. You know, what is the true benefit of this technique? What is its larger cost?

Likewise, in D.C. the following year, when law enforcement was seeking to expand the database in D.C., again I had the opportunity to explain to the D.C. council the concerns about familial searching. And again, there in D.C., the council banned the practice. The arguments presented were the same ones that were presented to Maryland. So, understand that advocacy for familial searching for the reasons that I’ve discussed and shared with you, can generate a political base against databases. And if what you’re going to be going after are property crimes and vehicle break-ins, and if the failures are going to be more than the successes, ask yourself why would you do this — in addition to the larger issues that I’ve talked to you about, in terms of a fully-functioning and flourishing democracy. I did have a clip here, but the prosecutor’s notebook won’t play it.

[Laughter]

Morrissey: It’s Apple, man.

Mercer: That’s right. I’m Mac; he’s PC.

[Laughter]

Mercer: But it was a clip of basically the answer to the racial justice implication. Because you know what the answer is? Well, let’s put everybody in the database. Let’s have a universal database. And I had this wonderful clip of the attorney general of the state of Maryland telling the Maryland legislature, “Hey look! Today we’re just concerned about putting persons arrested for felonies into the database, but you know, in the not-too-distant future, everybody’s going to be in the database, right? It’s just one expansion after another.” That’s the answer. And you know what, it doesn’t solve the racial justice issues; all it does is mask them. So it’s not a satisfactory answer at all.

Scrutiny of the future — and this is from the FBI’s own website — when we talk about where does familial searching technology take us, and does it imperil the primary mission of CODIS? But here on the FBI website, they’re talking about how the dramatic increase in the number of profiles in NDIS result in the need to re-architect the CODIS software. They want to enhance the kinship analysis — now, the initial purpose, of course, is to assist in the aid of identification of missing persons, but there’s going to be mission creep. It’s going to start off there, and then it’s going to expand beyond that. And that’s a real danger here, is that the familial searching technique, once employed, is going to again result in future mission creep and take you to a place that you never intended to be at in the beginning.

They’re using STR and MT-DNA information as well as meta-data. What does that mean? Now they’re linking up other databases with DNA databases to conduct additional investigations. And if you’re a thinking person about the control of your information in our society today, we should be concerned when the government starts linking up these large databases. And you look at the expansion of these databases — I’m preaching to the choir; you know this, these numbers, look from 2007 to 2011, an increase of over 5.5 million with arrestees and now we’re expanding this by a factor of, basically, five? If you’re including through familial searching all first-degree relatives? Is that really what you want to do with your database? You know, why is this going to cause eroding public support? Look at the concerns that have been reported as Americans’ top concerns for entering for entering the 21st century: Fear of loss of personal privacy; concern about misuse of personal information; and concern about the hallmarks of fair information practices, notice, consent and neutrality, which, with familial searching, don’t exist.

Also, something that has sort of gone “undiscussed” here today, but I think there’s also an awakening in the public consciousness to this DNA dollars and cents, concern that part of the expansion is being driven by some corporate interests that really have a big financial stake in DNA collection policies. Buy stock in ABI. Where should we go with this? Go back to the beginning. Go back to 1992, NRC 1, National Research Council 1. They recognized at the dawn of the forensic DNA era the threat of familial searching to DNA databases. And you know, they recommended “don’t do it.” Limit it through the software. Which is why CODIS is not a good tool for familial searching. And limit it by statutory guarantees of privacy. Maryland and D.C. have done just that. And other states can follow if this unfettered expansion to familial searching continues to be embraced. Thank you.

[Applause]

Rose: Stephen, Steve and Mitch, you did a terrific job of presenting the issues on both sides, and before we go to our question-and-answer period, two things real quick. I do want to recognize my colleague here in the audience, in the front row, Chuck Heurich, who I forgot to introduce at the beginning. He actually — there he is — he is my co-moderator, but we needed to make some extra room at the table, so he graciously sat in the front row. And he really is a subject matter expert on a lot of these issues, so I’m very grateful to have him here with us. And the second thing is, because the crime and genetics issue was raised, I wanted to let you know that because of the article that was in the New York Times on Monday around crime and genetics, did talk about this conference and our NIJ Director John Laub was quoted in that article. And he will be on the Diane Rehm Show, and there he is —

John Laub: Maybe not.

Rose: Oh, maybe not.

Laub: [Inaudible]

[Laughter]

Rose: Ok, well there was interest by the Diane Rehm Show in addressing this topic, and whether John appears on the show or not, she may be covering that, because we know it’s certainly an issue that is of great interest in this country. So I hope that you were thinking about some of the research questions that I mentioned at the very beginning of this panel as you were listening to the discussions. But why don’t we go ahead and open it up to questions right now. And I don’t think we have microphones here, so if you do have a question if you could speak very loudly. Dr. Laub?

Laub: [Inaudible]

Mercer: Well, I appreciate your comments, but I think they’re off base. To equate a racial disparity with gender disparity, I think misses the point.

Laub: I’m just saying there is disparity across the [Inaudible].

Mercer: Well, it’s not a distinction that I really think illuminates the issue at all. And we can have a discussion about various studies and life experiences, but the data, the government’s own data, is pretty darn clear that when you do an analysis and you control for all factors — for example, you talk about drug use. — Across all categories of drugs, the rate of white people who use drugs is much higher. But, the rate of black people who are arrested is greater than white people. So, you look at something as pedestrian as driving on I-95. There’s far more white people driving on I-95 than there are black people, but if you look at the litigation that has been ongoing in the state of Maryland, it’s quite clear that race is a factor when it comes to stops. When you talk about the detention of juveniles, again, the government’s own data, Department of Justice itself, concluded in a study, if I’m not mistaken funded by BJA or NIJ, that when you control all factors, race is a determining factor when it comes to the decision to detain or release a juvenile upon arrest. You don’t have to spend too much time in our criminal courts to understand that race is a factor. And it comes out in many different ways. Now I’ve been accused by some of raising the Boogeyman specter by talking about race because it is an emotional issue. I grant you that. And different people have different reactions to it. But we can’t move past our history. It is what it is. And we have to recognize that a law enforcement database that is comprised of a disparate number of racial minorities that’s further amplified through the technique of familial searching is really going to mean a lot to large segments of our population. And if you ignore that, you do so at your own peril.

Rose: Steve Siegel, did you want to respond to this?

Siegel: I do. A couple things. Dr. Laub, I tend to agree with where you’re going with this, and one of the things we seem to leave out in this discussion of “disproportionality” is the fact that the large majority of violent crime victims in the United States are also people of color. Forty-nine percent of the homicides in the United States were black males. So we’re missing that second part of the discussion. And I think that the socioeconomics — maybe that’s what Kris was asking for earlier, in terms of studies, future studies for NIJ — the socioeconomics and the other factors have got to be put in there when we’re talking about just blatantly laying out this idea of color and its role. And I thought there was interesting — I wrote down a quote that you talked about the impact on man of this familial searching, and in fact Mitch started talking about the fact that 90 percent of these crimes are crimes against women and children. And so I think there’s a need for balance when you’re using that kind of rhetoric about, as you call it, the Boogeyman.

Rose: Yes, ma’am.

Audience member 1: [Inaudible] I think that’s the issue, even when we talk about community involvement and sharing. Who are these communities? Another research body, another community organization again that doesn’t have a representative demographic to the communities affected that we’re talking about. [Inaudible]

Rose: Thank you for your comment. Questions? Additional questions for our panel.

Audience member 2: [Inaudible]

Mercer: Well, I think they’re both concerns. I mean, I have a concern about CODIS itself and the racial disparities that are reflected in any law enforcement database. And I think stakeholders do also. The public does. My point is that if you’re going to take a law enforcement database that already is disparate and disproportionate for a variety of reasons that reflects the history of race in our criminal justice system in this country, you’re going to further amplify that effect through familial searching, and now you’re effectively expanding the database again along the lines of race and class.

Audience Member 2: [Inaudible]

Mercer: Well, let me say this, the metric that is used for CODIS right now to gauge effectiveness I think is misleading. I mean, the investigation’s aided metric does not tell you how many cases downstream have resulted in convictions through a database match. So that is, there’s a cost-benefit analysis that has to come into play. If you’re asking me do I support DNA databases, I have argued against the taking of a DNA sample from anyone without probable cause that they have committed an offense, so I won’t shy away from that. I mean, if you want to paint me as sort of an extreme because I’m opposed to CODIS, so be it. But that’s my personal and legal position is that the taking of DNA from someone without judicial determination of probable cause that they have committed a crime is a violation of the fourth amendment. And I’ll argue that to the end of the day. But let’s not lose sight of what we’re talking about here, which is the technique of familial searching. And my message, which is that if you embrace familial searching, you’re going to be encountering not just defense attorneys, but you’re going to be encountering a political opposition because of the issues that it implicates.

Rose: Thank you, Steven. I’m going to give Mitch a chance to respond to that before he jumps over the table.

[Laughter]

Morrissey: You know, I learned something very early in my career. [It] was a senior prosecutor; he said to me, “On closing argument, you need to convince the jury that Western civilization will collapse at its very base if they don’t find the defendant guilty in this case.” Now it was car break-in, so that’s pretty hard to do. And I have to hand it to Stephen, because this is the first time I’ve ever heard him say our democracy will collapse at its very base if we do familial searching. I’ve heard all of his other arguments, and I got to tell you a couple of things there are very misleading in what he said. One, those of you who know CODIS know victims’ profiles do not go into CODIS. But he slipped that in, and it was intentional because he was reading from a script. You know that and he knows that. This is not a fourth amendment violation under any circumstances. And if it was, Stephen would cite you the cases that says that it is. Let me cite you the most liberal federal district in the United States, the ninth circuit, which is the only court that has addressed familial searching specifically. And it says it’s questionable whether the rights of the perpetrator, if ultimately identified through the use of a familial comparison, are violated. And they go on to say that the individual who was actually compared that’s in the database that has focused the investigation on the individual eventually captured is not a violation of constitutional privacy either. It’s U.S. versus Poole, but he didn’t cite that when he through around his fourth amendment violations. Now I’ve heard all these scare tactics; I’ve heard all of the words, the “genetic informant,” all of these things, “genetic surveillance,” but when you get down to the idea that what this is, is using technology that we have and have paid for in a constitutional and legal way with very strict policies, all of his arguments fall to the wayside.

Mercer: For those of you in labs, how many of you maintain victim profiles and elimination profiles and quality assurance profiles, that is of staff members, police officers, or other people that come into contact with evidence, you have a local database at your lab that has those profiles, which you cannot upload into CODIS. Am I right or wrong? The practice varies between jurisdictions. On the local level, because local labs that maintain DNA databases are not subject to CODIS regulation. And if you want to look at a case, look at Judge Titus’ opinion from the U.S. District Court in Maryland, the Davis case, which talked about precisely this situation where today’s victim, whose DNA profile was in a local crime lab database, became tomorrow’s suspect. There was also a case out of Louisiana that was reported on by the Washington Post that involved a woman who had been the victim of a rape. Her profile was developed and through an assessment of that profile, an examiner noticed a similarity to the profile in a separate, unrelated case, and they went out after the victim’s brother. So the concern about being a genetic informant is real as you continue to expand DNA databases. And if I’m not mistaken, and correct me if I’m wrong, I’m sure you will, Mitch, but in your beta testing of your familial software, you used a DNA database that included quality assurance profiles of your lab workers and in fact hit upon one lab worker whose brother was implicated in a sexual assault. Accurate or inaccurate?

Morrissey: In our research, yes. But there is not a state policy in the United States that would allow you to do any kind of searching like that. The important thing to realize here is that familial searching can be used on any type of DNA database no matter how big; no matter how small. What we are asking the states that we’re dealing with is to do this in a very controlled setting where they have set down a policy that is based on the constitutionality and the legality of that. Maryland prohibits it. Stephen was successful. So until they change their statute, we are not advising Maryland that they should violate the law and do any familial searching.

Mercer: So just in terms of the accusation, the allegation that I had made a misstatement in my speech — that’s not correct.

Morrissey: But you said victims are in CODIS, and victims are not in CODIS.

Mercer: No, I did not say that victims were in CODIS.

Rose: Are there any other questions from the audience?

[Laughter]

Rose: Yes, sir. Stand up, please. Thank you.

Audience Member 3: [Inaudible]

Mercer: I mean, there’s two questions there, and I think the first part of that question really goes to the core of the issue about “What is the privacy interest that is implicated?” And the point that I made in my discussion is that it is the surveillance itself that is the injury. It’s the surveillance itself that creates a stigma on a group that’s largely defined by race and class. And to have that stigma of being that group — if you think back to Dr. Seuss, has the blue dot or doesn’t have the blue dot — it’s that stigma. It’s the surveillance itself that causes the injury. That’s the point. It’s not — and this is something that the prosecution is always saying — you know, how is the family member injured? They’re not injured — are they injured when the DNA sample is taken from the convicted offender? Are they injured when there is a computer search? Are they only injured if the police knock down their door and arrest them? That misses the point. And I think this is something that, as a group of scientists, you have to be very sensitive to. Because this idea that a group is being targeted for surveillance really concerns that group. It may not concern you so much, but it concerns that group. And if that group is part of the political process, when it comes time to gain support for your CODIS database, or money for your CODIS database, you may be caught off guard.

Audience Member 3: [Inaudible]

Mercer: Is there intrinsic value to privacy? I mean, this is part of a much larger discussion about surveillance in our post-9/11 world.

Audience Member 3: [Inaudible]

Mercer: Yeah, it’s the stigma. It’s the surveillance that’s the injury. It’s the stigma that it causes when an individual is in a position where they are aware that, in effect, their DNA is in a law enforcement database. Now, maybe that doesn’t concern you, but it concerns other people that are not criminals, but are innocent people who are good, upstanding, law-abiding citizens who don’t see why their DNA should be in a law enforcement database when they’ve never done anything wrong. It really goes to the core of the values that —

Audience Member 3: [Inaudible]

Mercer: Look, if you want to walk down the street and be subject to a stop-and-frisk for no reason at all because it’s going to catch more criminals, all power to you. But that’s not the United States.

Rose: We have time for probably--I would say maybe one more question. Is there somebody that has to ask?

Audience member 4: [Inaudible]

Rose: It sounds like the question is, “Are people aware that if they commit a crime or are convicted of a crime that their profile could be put into CODIS?” You got to speak up loud[ly].

Audience member 4: [Inaudible]

Rose: “That if you commit a crime, your profile is going to go in, and basically that’s the right that you have given up.”

Mercer: What about family members though? I mean that’s the whole point of this discussion is that you stop someone on the street and say, “Hey, you know you could be in a law enforcement database because someone in your family committed a crime?” You know, we can slice this any way. In effect, your profile is in CODIS where they can use the software to identify you as a family member. That’s the effect of it.

[Inaudible]

Rose: Ok, we don’t want people talking over each other. Mitch, did you have something you wanted to say?

Morrissey: Well, I mean —

Rose: Is the answer always yes to that question?

[Laughter]

Morrissey: Yes, it is. You know, you can use all the scare tactics about this, but if you sit down and you read about it, and you do it in a fair, reasonable way with people that consider privacy, consider the constitution, the fourth amendment, this can be done in a very safe way for all the concerns that Stephen raises. And don’t let him scare you that you’re going to lose your CODIS database if you do familial searching. Because we all know if a court finds that something happened that was unconstitutional, they throw out the case, and you stop that procedure. That has not happened with familial searching in the United States, and I cited you the case where that’s taken place. But the world is not going to end if we do familial searching. CODIS is not going to stop existing if we do familial searching. It does not violate the fourth amendment, and we are proponents of that because we know those things. We’re not in the business of catching criminals that are raping and hurting people in our community only to go to court and find out what we did was unconstitutional. That’s all I have.

Rose: And Mitch, because I gave you the first word, Stephen Mercer I’m going to let you have the last word here. But you’ve got about thirty seconds.

Mercer: The concerns that I raise are real. They may not be real to my adversary, but they are real. And when you expand a database that already consists of a disproportionate number of profiles from racial minorities, you risk imperiling the primary purpose and mission of your database. Be careful whether you embrace this new technology because you will get pushback on it.

Rose: I want to thank all of our panelists. I want to thank Stephen Mercer, Steve Siegel, Mitch Morrissey. They provided incredibly interesting information and thank you for being such good sports with us here today. It was very informative. Thank you.

[Applause]

Mark Nelson: Well, good afternoon. Welcome to the panel on "Making Sense of Backlogs." I'm Mark Nelson. I'm a DNA program manager at NIJ. I share those responsibilities with my partner, Min Nguyen. We have a distinguished panel here for you today. I'm gonna try to set the stage a little bit for why we're having this panel.

NIJ often receives requests from policymakers, press, media asking for what is the national backlog. And in the past, we've been relying on studies — national study has been done in 2003. The most recent national study was by BJS in 2005. That is now published. So in 2007, we initiated two surveys to take a look at this issue. I want to point out that both of these are still in peer review or going into peer review, and so all results that you hear of those two surveys will be preliminary in nature.

We want to address some of the issues with backlogs and dispel some of the myths. For example, I received a request from an individual who wanted to know why there was still a national backlog of DNA cases when we had funded a quarter of a million dollars to date at the President’s DNA Initiative, why were they still there. And I think folks have the misconception …

Can you — I guess I'm gonna have to lean forward. Is that better? OK.

There's a misconception of what a backlog really is, and I want to set the stage for you. If you have a laboratory that's done 50 percent more cases this year than it did last year, we'd all say that's really good. They've made real progress. They've increased their capacity. But if their demand has gone up by 50 percent, their backlog won't go away. It's only when the capacity increase is greater than the backlog that — or the demand that you’re going to have a decrease in the backlog.

So we're going to talk today. We're going to have three panelists. Our first is Kevin Strom. Kevin is a senior research scientist with the Crime, Violence, and Justice Program at RTI, and his interests are in law enforcement responses to the community violence, as well as forensic science effects on the criminal justice system. He's led numerous studies for the Department of Justice, including studies determining the nature of forensic case backlogs among the law enforcement agencies, forensic labs and medical examiners offices. Kevin will be speaking about the survey that RTI has done of law enforcement cases that have not been submitted to crime laboratories.

Our second panelist will be discussing the impact of increasing demands and a huge increase in his particular demand on his crime laboratory. Our second speaker will be Greg Matheson, who's the director of the Los Angeles Police Department Crime Lab. He's been with the lab as a criminalist supervisor and manager for 30 years. And I'm going to have to read this part: He's core qualified in toxicology, serology, crime scenes, explosives, flammable liquids and vehicle lamp filaments. Obviously, he's very well qualified. He served on the board of directors for the CAC, California Association of Crime Lab Directors, ASCLD, American Board of Criminalistics and is a member of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences.

Our third speaker will be speaking about case backlogs in crime laboratories, as well as an overview perspective. He's very well qualified to do that. It's Kevin Lothridge. He's the CEO of the NFSTC. And in 2007, NFSTC won a competitive process to become the NIJ Center for Forensic Excellence. Previous to being the CEO, Kevin has been a chemist, a chief chemist, lab director, and although he’s trained as a forensic chemist, he's acquired expertise in other areas, such as drug chemistry and fire debris analysis. And he's the past president of the American Society of Crime Lab Directors.

We're gonna hold all questions until the end of the panel, and I'll call on Kevin to start us off. Kevin Strom.

Kevin Strom: Thank you. Good afternoon. Today I'm going to be talking about a survey of law enforcement forensic evidence processing that RTI has conducted on behalf of NIJ. As Mark mentioned, these findings are preliminary. The final report is currently under peer review with NIJ.

And, just a quick overview of this. As many of you can imagine, this is not easy information to obtain. Law enforcement agencies — many don't, don't have record management systems that readily allow you to extract information on cases that contain forensic evidence but that were never went to the laboratory. And that was really our main goal here. So it was a challenging, challenging initiative, but I think we have some results that can, hopefully, move the field forward, especially as we learn about this issue.

Just a little bit about forensic backlogs in general. As many of you know, more evidence is being collected from a forensic perspective than can really be managed at forensic crime laboratories. And most of that information to this point has relied on the laboratory side of things to establish this backlog. In 2002, BJS conducted a census of crime laboratories and reported upwards of 260,000 backlog cases. An update in 2005 showed that that number in that time period had increased 24 percent, and those backlogs typically extend across all forms of evidence, including drug chemistry.

The sole initiative to look at sort of the other side of the fence of the backlog problem — and those are cases that really never left law enforcement but that contained some forensic evidence and could have potentially moved forward from an investigative perspective if they were analyzed — was conducted in 2002 in an NIJ national survey of state and local law enforcement agencies. And that survey estimated that there were 50,000, 52,000 unsolved homicides and 169,000 unsolved rapes that contained biological evidence that were not submitted for analysis to a crime laboratory. An additional 264,000 property cases were estimated to not have gone to the lab as well.

So in 2007, RTI was funded by NIJ to conduct the current survey. The current survey was different in that we were focused on all forms of forensic evidence, not just DNA. Our focus again, though, was on state and local law enforcement that investigated crimes as part of their regular processes. So we excluded, for example, sheriff's offices that only had jurisdiction over courts and jails. Primary objective was to estimate the number of unsolved violent homicide and rape cases and property cases that contained some form of evidence but that did not go to the crime laboratory, also the types of forensic evidence associated in these cases for violence, and the capabilities and procedures in law enforcement agencies for processing, submitting and retaining evidence.

It was a national survey, as I mentioned. We used a methodology similar to the LEMAS Survey, the BJS LEMAS Survey. Our final sample was over 3,000 state and local law enforcement agencies, and we used a multimode data collection approach, including Web mail, fax and telephone follow-up. The nature of the responses — the nature of the questions didn't really allow for conducting the survey on the phone very easily. So the phone was mainly used to follow up with agencies and discuss any problems they had with submitting the survey. Often the survey required coordination within the law enforcement agency from investigations, crime analysis, research and planning, and property and evidence.

We had a very distinguished panel of experts from forensic science, law enforcement, research, some of whom are in the room today, that assisted with the development of the survey instrument and even follow-up with specific agencies. And, of course, NIJ provided critical guidance and also helped obtaining letters of support, including a letter from the IACP.

In terms of response rates, overall, especially with a survey that was challenging for many law enforcement agencies, I think we did pretty well. We had a 73 percent response rate. Those responses were highest for large agencies, those with 100 or more sworn officers or those with 50 to 99 officers, and lowest for the very small agencies, which was not a surprise considering their often limited resources.

Responses were also highest for municipal police departments and lowest for state police agencies. In some cases state police agencies were challenged because of the decentralized nature of some of their units. We did get a fairly good response rate on the Web, which was promising, and by hard copy. Those were really the two primary methods used to respond. We also ran a help desk, so that allowed agencies to contact us if they had problems or to coordinate responses within the agency itself.

This is just a screen shot of the public version of the Web site which allowed for password control and the ability to track responses over time.

So in terms of the results, overall we … These are defined as cases, again, that were unsolved, so open cases that had not been closed by arrests or by exceptional means that contained some form of forensic evidence but that were never sent to the forensic lab for processing. And we asked about questions over the previous five years. The expert panel and others thought that asking within a longer period of time would be extremely challenging for law enforcement agencies to answer and to approximate.

So what did the results show? Overall, we estimated for homicides about nearly 4,000 homicides over this period that met that criteria. In other words, about 14 percent of unsolved cases were never sent to the crime lab for testing. For rapes, about 27,500 cases, or about 18 percent. And then, of course, for property crimes, because of the sheer volume, more than 5 million, so 23 percent of unsolved property cases with evidence were never submitted to the crime lab for analysis.

So what types of evidence were associated with these cases? Well, for violent crimes, homicide and rape, about a third involved DNA evidence, which suggests that with additional testing, some proportion of these cases could have moved forward, about 20 percent of all trace evidence or latent prints and 18 percent firearms or tool mark evidence.

In terms of agency characteristics, I think some could assume that this is a problem only specific to large agencies. And in fact, large agencies, those over 100 or more sworn, did account for a sizable proportion of the unsolved and unanalyzed homicide cases. But the story was a little bit different for rape. About 6 out of 10 originated with those largest agencies, but smaller agencies did account for a larger proportion of rape cases than for homicides. So I think it's important to understand this and design policies that don't just allow for resources and perhaps procedural changes to large agencies but also those smaller agencies.

By agency type, municipal police departments accounted for about 4 out of 5 and slightly lower percentages of unsolved rapes. And sheriff's departments accounted for about 18 percent of both. In terms of state police, about 1 in 10 of backlogged rape cases originated with state police agencies where they had primary jurisdiction.

So what were some common factors for not submitting evidence? We asked agencies to list all of these and list the most common or the primary inhibiting factor for not submitting evidence. More than half of agencies indicated they had not submitted evidence because no suspect had been identified. About 3 out of 10 were uncertain where to send the evidence, and some issues also pertained to prosecution, the agency looking to the prosecutor for guidance. About 14 percent indicated a suspect had been identified but not formally charged and 18 percent reported that the analysis had not been formally requested by the prosecutor.

Laboratory resource and timeliness issues were also cited. An inability of the laboratory to produce timely results, at least in the opinion of the agency was cited in 13 percent; insufficient funding for analysis in 11 percent; and the fact that the laboratory would not accept evidence due to backlog issues for 8 percent of the inhibiting factors.

We also asked about evidence retention. One issue was do agencies have a policy for retaining DNA evidence for closed cases. Less than half of agencies reported they had such a policy in place either because of a state, state statute or because of an agency-specific guideline. One in 5 reported they were unsure if their agency had such a policy. But, but when a policy did exist, it ultimately fell upon an investigating agency to store and maintain this evidence, 8 out of 10.

Law enforcement are also overwhelmingly responsible for retaining evidence for unsolved cases. They were responsible for, in more than 9 out of 10 cases, for storing this evidence on site in a storage location.

So what are some implications? One is that, obviously, these data indicate that these substantial forensic backlogs continue to exist in law enforcement agencies. Nearly 1 in 7 unsolved homicide cases, 1 in solve, unsolved rape cases, and 1 in 4 property cases were not submitted to a forensic laboratory for analysis.

And these backlogs are not limited to only large agencies, they also impact those that are smaller and even the very small agency.

One of the things that comes out of this study is the implication that more training, even though substantial training and funding has gone out to agencies to close cases and to move more forensic evidence through the system, more could be done to improve awareness among investigators, law enforcement officials about the need to rapidly move evidence, including DNA evidence, through the system, including enhanced policies that require submission under many circumstances.

Some U.S. law enforcement agencies continue to have the mindset that forensic evidence is beneficial primarily for prosecuting crimes and not as a primary means for developing new leads. And I think some of our presenters will talk a little bit more about that.

Another critical finding is that law enforcement information systems need to be enhanced so that they can systematically track and monitor forensic evidence in criminal cases. Many of the agencies struggled to respond to this survey for that very reason, and I think agencies have also struggled to really, over time, track how this issue was affecting their agency and what cases need to be moved forward in a timely manner. More than 4 in 10 agencies responding to the survey reported that they had no computerized system in place with this ability, and even those that reported they did, it's unclear really what the capacity of those systems was.

More guidelines and resources are also required for evidence processing and retaining evidence in agencies, but these policies must take note and count the resources available to law enforcement, both for evidence storage and for reviewing and analyzing cases.

As an aside, we also did ask about internal capacity for agencies for some nonlaboratory staff within law enforcement agencies for things like latent prints. About 4 in 10 reported they had staff that regularly conducted those activities, and about 20 percent of those reported those staff were currently experiencing a case backlog. So these things are not only affecting information going out of the law enforcement agency in the laboratories but also the ability of the agency to process evidence internally.

The other issue is the ability to improve, improve the ability for police agencies to track, to track and discard evidence that is no longer required and maintained by law. I think this was a critical issue. In many cases, agencies are retaining evidence for long periods of time because, really, they're unsure what they can safely discard of when, and for that reason many evidence storage rooms are filled with evidence that may not, may no longer need to be kept.

I guess a final implication is just the need to coordinate and develop a prioritization system for getting evidence efficiently through the system. You know, we've heard a lot of — or at least fairly new information about the potential for analyzing property crime cases, but you can see by the sheer volume, 5 million really backlogged property cases, that adding those into the system without really some type of prioritization of those could result in further problems. So I think communicating across law enforcement, prosecutors and laboratories but also prioritization of cases that need to move through more rapidly is a needed next step.

Thank you.

(Applause.)

Greg Matheson: Good afternoon. My part of this presentation of "Making Sense of the DNA Backlog" is to share with you the LAPD experience or what I also like to call it "or what happens when your backlog increases by 1,700 percent overnight."

(Laughter.)

Matheson: Before I get started on this, I do want to thank NIJ for the opportunity to share this with you, and I also want to thank the Marriott Hotel because, for all of you that may have issues with your budget and office supplies, they've been leaving pens around and notepads. It’s going to make our office supply budget go just a little bit further.

(Laughter.)

Matheson: So if you haven't caught onto that, grab them.

So. I want to do a little background on the city of Los Angeles, obviously located in the southern portion of southern California. We have an officially counted population of about 4.1 million. I anticipate it's probably a little bit higher than that. We cover 468 square miles. There's a potential for a lot of crime within that area with that many people.

The interesting thing is that our crime rate is actually the lowest it's been since the 1960s, and our request rate and our number of submissions has never been higher. So it kind of shows me that what we do as a community is becoming more important, and we're being involved more and more in the investigation of crimes.

A little on our laboratory. Our total staff right now is 171 people. That consists of 117 criminalists and other analysts, plus 54 support, and I consider support on both sides of the analysts. The supervisors and managers are support to the criminalists and the analysts, along with clerical and whatever technical support we have below 'em. Out of that 171 staff, as of today 60 are in our biology or serology DNA unit.

So I start off with our definition of a backlog. Historically and in almost all of our units still, it's just a request for analysis for which a report has not yet been issued. I figure as soon as a report is made, a request is made of our laboratory, it goes into the backlog because who knows when it's going to get done. Some are done the same day. Some may be sitting a year or more before it happens. And that's how we've always considered our backlog of cases that we had to work. And a lot is based on the decisions that are made on the backlog number.

To give you an idea of just backlog in general across the lab … The one thing I do want to point out is the serology DNA number does not include the increase of sexual assault cases, which is the main crux to this talk. But if you scan down those numbers — I mean, here we are talking about mainly DNA backlogs — there's a number there that jumps out pretty significantly of another unit that maybe could use a little bit of attention in dealing with our backlog, and that's our firearms analysis unit at 3,388 cases.

I was at a meeting not too, a while back, and we were talking about resources, and our assistant laboratory director that manages the firearms unit walked out of that meeting a little bit frustrated going, doesn't anybody care if anybody gets shot in this city? Because the resources are all going to DNA, and they obviously have a need, too. My answer to her is unfortunately right now, no, they don't. They want to know about the DNA. Now, if they were shot in association with a rape, there's a good chance that that firearms work might get done on that. But the reality is we're dealing with DNA and biological evidence.

This reminds me. I was going to give a disclaimer at the beginning regarding the numbers that are up here. I'm talking in broad terms. Every number I give up there is accurate at some point in time.

(Laughter.)

Matheson: But if you try and do the math, you know, if you remember a number before and say that doesn't add up, that's the way this works. They change constantly. It was an education process for our politicians — it sometimes took, sometimes didn't — wondering why are we giving them all these different numbers when they think they're asking the same question. Well, if they ask it today, it's going to be different than yesterday or the week before. So it's just the reality of the process we're dealing with.

So the crux to this mainly is the rape kit evidence. We have a combined kit in the county of Los Angeles. Both the city Los Angeles Police Department and the Sheriff's Department uses the same kit. A lot of the collection sites overlap. So it makes life easier for them, but obviously, the LAPD — the ones that occur in the city of Los Angeles come to us. The ones that occur everywhere else in the county go to the county lab.

Our storage conditions is we have, I think it's, nine, permanently built-in freezers that range anywhere from 15 by 30 up to about 60 by 30 that are in different locations, most of them in one, but there's a couple different locations. We also have an additional, I think it's, seven or eight freezer trucks that are leased. We store at this point every piece of biological evidence that comes into the possession of the laboratory in the freezer, and we've been doing that since about 2002.

So the pictures that I have here, and some you'll see later, are pulled directly out of the media because they've come in, and everybody wants to take a picture of all the unanalyzed rape kits that are in all of our freezers. Well, they're shooting everything, obviously, not just the rape kits. But it makes for a good graphic for them.

So we had a change in our serology/DNA backlog definition. This was a policy change or a political change. We talked a little bit about it at the end of the last session, but our new definition, when it comes to rape cases, is all sexual assault kits that are collected by the department for which a final report has not yet been issued. The detectives no longer have any discretion as to whether or not they request a kit to be made. They prioritize 'em for us, so we know what the important ones or the ones that require a faster turnaround time is, but they no longer make requests. Every kit that exists in our backlog, every kit that is collected within the city limits will become part of our backlog.

The only exception to that — and this is still up in the air — are kits that are collected where it's determined not to be associated with a crime. We're arguing the fact that if we can't load it into CODIS, why do we want to analyze it? There's that one has yet to be completely decided, but that's currently what we're standing by.

So the serology/DNA backlog — oh, there it is, prior — again, this is about two years ago, but prior to our rape kit backlog definition change, we counted a backlog of 444 cases. That was both the rape kits and other biological evidence analysis that was requested by the detectives. After the rape kit analysis — or the backlog definition change, overnight we are sitting at about 7,500 or about a 1,700 percent increase. I hope I did the math right, but the numbers sound really scary. I was going to say good, but it was an amazing change, and we had to give some serious thought to how we were going to deal with this significant change in our backlog.

So why did the backlog definition change? Victim advocates groups got involved. Among those, primarily were the Santa Monica Rape Treatment Center or (inaudible) very, very strong in our city, very influential when it comes to this type of both collection and analysis. The Human Rights Watch got involved; I'll be talking a little bit more about them. The Hollywood Chapter of NOW was the most recent addition to this group; now they're very, very involved. The National Association for Women. Obviously, the media jumped in; that's how the victim advocates get their point across or were able to get it across. And politicians. This is not necessarily in any order because they kept … You know, it would come up in a variety of different ways.

The Human Rights Watch in March 2009 came out with a report they called "Testing Justice: The Rape Kit Backlog in Los Angeles City and County," a very comprehensive report. They were working on it for easily more than a year. We became very well acquainted with many of the members associated, as did the L.A. County Sheriff's Department. And then they submitted this significant report. It's very, very long. It deals with the issue.

One of the things that I want to point out, we had a member of the Human Rights Watch speak recently at a California Association of Crime Laboratory Directors meeting. And the point that they wanted to make very clear is they're just starting in Los Angeles. Basically she looked around the room at all the different lab directors from California and said we will be coming to your lab next. I anticipate they will be going nationwide at some point because this is a significant issue to them. So be prepared. They are, as a rule, very fair about what they do, and we had a pretty good working relationship with them.

But one of the things … Don't you hate slides that just have huge amounts of writing on it? Don't worry about it. The point I wanted to make is in some respects they really get it. They weren't just attacking the lab for not getting the work done. They were very concerned about the fact that this is a combined issue. "For rape victims," I'm going to read a couple parts of it.

"For rape victims to have access to justice, policymakers and law enforcement officials in Los Angeles County will need to test every booked rape kit. But their responsibility doesn't end there. Law enforcement, in collaboration with rape treatment providers, with the support of elected officials, will need to create systems to ensure that every reported rape case is thoroughly investigated and, when appropriate, leads to the arrest of those responsible." They get that it's a whole system problem, and the crime lab is just one little piece of it.

"The remedy will require a comprehensive plan that's made known to the public, compliance with existing laws, and swift and efficient action. This is a necessary part of the core governmental obligation to protect victims of sexual violence and promote public safety."

The media, obviously, also gets involved a lot locally. They started off with a number of articles saying about how far we were behind in processing the cases. I love this one, "LAPD Rape Kit Debacle Continues." But then it starts shifting a little bit and saying that, OK, we're going to clear them all by 2010. That was, I think, a really good projection until kind of the economy fell out of things and the money that's going to be available to do it may or may not be there. We'll see. But we were shooting to have the backlog eliminated by mid-2010.

And then finally, "A Solution for LAPD's Rape Kit Backlog Announced." We have been working our way through this, and they don't always just write nasty articles about us. So occasionally there are good things.

The politicians. The head of our Public Safety Committee, City Councilman Jack Weiss, was a strong proponent of this. He goes back in his efforts to get us resources many, many, many years, long before Human Rights Watch came into play, long before the Santa Monica Rape Treatment Center. And in fact, over the last couple of years, he's given us $350,000 out of his private office account or discretionary fund, or whatever the council members have, to work on some of the rape kits.

Our city controller, Laura Chick, also audited the whole issue and came up with a not-so-flattering report. She calls for the city to end rape kit backlog once and for all. Again, an awful lot of it points at the laboratory, but she was pretty … pointed her finger a lot at both the department as a whole and the city as a whole for not providing the support, the council for not providing the support in the past.

I think one of the interesting things about this is because, you know, we all tend to take things personally, and they say nasty things about a job we should be doing, and we haven't done it. The day after her report came out, I was sitting in the airport getting ready to fly out to Sacramento, and I got a call from her on my cell phone. And we had met in the past. I had no clue how she got my cell phone number, but she did. Basically not apologizing but saying, I hope you're not taking this personally. I really want to help you out. It was just nice having her understand that.

So why weren't the cases requested originally? Well, the detective mind set regarding sexual assault investigations changed over the years. I mean, I've been … Talking about the dinosaurs, I mean, I was doing serology work back in the early 80s and late 70s, and at that point no hospital wanted to take a rape victim. They would sit in the emergency room for hours on end waiting to be, have their, their evidence collected. It was a nightmare. Detectives didn't want to handle it. It was relegated to a small part of the department.

Obviously, things have changed. The SAR programs, or the SANE programs, the evidence being collected is significantly better than it used to be, and the detectives are coming around understanding that this is an important case that needs to be investigated. When the California Cold Hit Program came out, which was in about 2001, 2002 and I met with a bunch of detectives at that point, some of the less enlightened ones said, well, if you get hits, we're going to have to do more work. You know, what are you doing this for? Obviously, that's changing somewhat, but this explains why they weren't requesting them.

They also had the mindset regarding comparison versus, you know, answering it. People did not … well, prior to CODIS becoming the level that it is now, we would discourage a request to be made for a kit unless they had a suspect in custody, unless we had something to compare it to because it was still more of a prosecutorial tool or confirming what they already knew. Now it's a investigative tool.

Detectives would self-triage the cases. They wouldn't make a request because they knew we had limited resources, and they wanted to make sure that the really important one we'd get around to. So they just didn't request a lot of them.

And obviously, our laboratory resources, even if they did request them, at the time we couldn't have done the analysis.

So … oh well. In late December of 2008, the part of our department that we were moved to, which was the Detective Bureau, decided they wanted to know exactly how many kits were in the freezers. Up to that point, we were calculating them by a means that left a lot to be desired. So the chief of detectives said we're going to find out exactly how many kits are in the freezer, and he ended up getting 50 detectives over about a two-week period — they spent in the neighborhood of about 2,000 hours — with parkas on and notepads looking at every item of evidence in those dozen-plus freezers that we have to determine how many rape kits or sexual assault kits were in the freezer.

What they found was there were 11,077 rape kits that were currently in the freezer; 48 percent of them had already been analyzed. I thought that was really good. And 52 percent had not been analyzed. So now we had a firm number. That 7,000-plus was calculated. We now know that we had just under 5,200 kits that actually had not been analyzed.

Of the 5,200 that were not analyzed, you can see how they broke down. One of the reasons that some weren't analyzed, 23 percent of them were cleared by arrest. Why request the analysis if it's already been determined who did the crime? Thirty-six percent were cleared "other," or most of those were D.A. rejects. They take and file, you know, take 'em to file. The D.A. would reject them. Why do the analysis at that point? "Investigation continued" was a big chunk, and then 770 were not eligible for CODIS upload, which was great because we immediately dropped our backlog by that 770.

Let's look at the "investigation continued." We had 70 percent were known suspects that they were still looking for, they were doing the investigation on.

But the important one is this middle one, 29 percent stranger crimes. We had, I believe it was, three detectives who were doing nothing but looking up those 5,000-plus cases to find out what the status of them, and they were saying out of these 402, they're looking at this going, why didn't the detective request it? So that really was a situation where the detective fell down on the ball. So really, from our standpoint, I think we really kind of dropped the ball on only 402 out of the 5,000-plus. Those are the ones where we should have been being hammered for because those should have been collected.

But there are reasons to do those other ones. Maybe a D.A. reject wouldn't be a D.A. reject if we analyzed it, uploaded it, and found it hit to another case. And there's a lot of reasons out there to analyze kits, and we aren't currently doing it.

So how can the laboratory respond to a big change in the backlog definition?

You know, the first thing is you get defensive. It's not our fault. You know, we only did what we were being asked for, you know. Go away. Don't bother us with this sort of stuff.

The next thing is argue the necessity of the case. Well, why do all of them? You don't need to. It isn't needed for investigation. You know, we can come up with a lot of reasons why we don't want to do this work.

Finally, you might want to embrace the opportunity, and I'll get into how that's worked for us.

I went through three of those. I mean, I think that my position on analyzing these kits has changed significantly over the last two to three years because I've become educated on what all is involved in the cases and what can come out of it.

So backlog versus resources. How do you determine your resource needs within it? You know, we now have a major difference in the backlog, but let's take a look at it. There's different ways of doing it. We used to always do it based on the request for work. You knew approximately how many requests you had coming into the laboratory. If you weren't getting 'em done, you'd go to the city council or whoever it was, ask for more resources based on what you were being asked to do. That's how we always did it before.

You could do it based on what you think you'll get in the budget. I mean, there were times when we knew that the city budget was going to be poor, so we didn't ask for a lot, even though we needed it. The problem with that is when the budget gets good again, they say, well, why didn't you ask for it before? If you didn't ask for it before, you don't really need it now, so I'm not going to give it to you. So you always ask for it.

Finally, you do it based on potential workload. Had we been asking for resources in the past when there was a policy change, and our backlog went from 444 up to 7,000-plus, you know, maybe we would have said our potential backlog or our potential workload is 7,000 cases, and maybe 10 years ago we would have started asking for more resources based on that. It probably wouldn't have gone anywhere, but who knows?

So finally, we know we got to do it. We've got these kits. We have to get it analyzed. So I had to develop a backlog-elimination plan. I'll go through the overview of it real quick and then go into specifics.

First, identify the workload. Backlog is any case coming in that hasn't been analyzed. So you got to take into account your new including, new cases.

Determine your capacity, how many you can get out internally and externally. We did a lot of outsourcing, by the way. We do DNA in-house, but we do a lot of outsourcing.

Identify the funding that's available for it.

Identify other resource needs, such as we rely on our property division to move the evidence around. We rely on detectives to do what they're supposed to do. Our success is based on a lot of other areas, and they're prepared to constantly revise the plan.

So when we're talking about backlog, ours was determined by the hand-count that the detectives did. However, we got new cases coming in all the time. That's going to change depending on the crime rate trends, the number of cases that are being reported. As we heard earlier, I mean, as we know, many of them are not reported. Well, what if all of a sudden, because we're getting more hits, and we're doing the work, everybody starts reporting or more people start reporting? That's going to change our new cases, which is going to throw off the plan.

Technology changes. Sometimes we'll get a new technology that allows us to analyze kits out to a week later or something. That's going to change the number of cases coming in.

And obviously, political changes will change the amount of cases that you have.

So just to give you an idea of what our historical average, if were basing it on the requests that we receive for analysis, you can see that from 2004 through roughly 2006, it stays constant and then it starts rising. So basically we've seen a 63 percent increase in requests for analysis in five years. Ignore the fact that we're being told now to do all the kits, requested or not. Just our requests went up that much. So if you're planning on figuring out how or the resources you need, you have to take that into consideration.

You've got to determine the capacity internal. You have to look at the individuals, how much they can do. Look at average unit productivity levels and figure out how many cases you can get out the door. The number of analysts you have may or may not – or it may change. As you'll see, ours changed significantly.

Technology changes. They become more efficient usually. You can get more cases out the door. Or a new technology comes along and all of a sudden everybody is less efficient. You know, all these things have to be considered and taken into effect or you throw a lot of disclaimers into your plan so they know that it's not necessarily going to be accurate.

Like I mentioned, we do a lot of outsourcing. The capacity of the different contract laboratories we use are changing constantly depending on other contracts they have, what else is happening in the rest of the country.

So looking at internal staff capacity, in fiscal years '07-'08, we received 13, 15 new positions for the unit alone. In fiscal year '08-'09, we received 16 more positions. This is all coming in because of – OK, where is it? There. In the next fiscal year, which is amazing considering what the whole fiscal situation is, we're supposed to get 20 more criminalists and a lab tech. So in the City of Los Angeles in the next fiscal year, there's only two job classes that are being allowed to hire: criminalists associated or staff associated with DNA and police officers. That's throughout the whole city.

Laboratory growth due to the rape kit. We went from 140 in 2007 to 171. We're going to go to 192 people in the lab next year. In the serology/DNA unit, we've gone from 28 to 81 in the last five years. Significant growth in internal capacity.

Funding for this project, backlog elimination. We will have received about $5 million in general funds – federal grants, about $2 million. Thank you, NIJ. Donations, which is an interesting funding source when it comes to police work. So far, we've had about $1 million and it's continuing to come in. The donations have come from the Los Angeles Police Foundation, the Hollywood NOW is out there and other civic groups.

Regarding the Police Foundation, they have a Web site up and circled up there is a button that says "donate now." So if somebody is on their Web site, they receive donations from individuals, you know, $20, $30, $40, up to large groups that have given us – one group has given us a half a million dollars towards this one topic, elimination of our backlog of sexual assault cases. That goes to embracing the opportunities.

We could continue to argue this forever, but we've received a lot of resources because of the bad press that this situation has received. I'm sure the city of L.A. isn't any different than most of your jurisdictions. The reality is they work on crisis, and this was a crisis that became a political issue. And we are embracing it for everything we can to grow the laboratory to meet the needs.

Identifying other resource needs. Like I mentioned, we rely on a variety of both internal and external groups.

You need a grant coordinator to handle all the grants coming in.

Contracts. We are dealing with four companies right now and the contracts change on a regular basis.

And I know none of you have problems with your IT group. You get always what you want right away. Yeah. They're interesting. They have held us up a couple of times.

Reconsider, re-evaluate, revise, revise, revise the plan constantly. Workload changes. Capacity changes. Funding could increase or decrease. It has gone up. It's gone down. They find more money. They tell us to increase our amount. The next day they figure, "oops, we didn't mean that. It's less." The number is all over the board. So you have to set up a way of dealing with every change that comes along.

Another little bit, but this is just an example of a portion of the spreadsheet that I used to both predict when we'd get done. We don't have a laser pointer. But if you look up there, the left-hand column is we know where we started at a certain point in time. We know how much money we had. We know what our backlog was, and you work your way down. By adding in the number of new cases that you estimate will come in the door each month, the amount of money that's going to be used on other types of contracting, the amount of kits that you expect to send out — all of these are estimations at the beginning of this program — you can figure out approximately how long it will take, given the cost. Any of those factors can be changed, and it will adjust the top number. You know when you're going to run out of money by, if you insert higher numbers of kits that are going out the door. You know roughly when the backlog is going to be eliminated.

On our current plan, our current spending, we're looking to be done with the backlog of the 4,000-plus kits by the end of the next fiscal year. But it's been a great tool for both predicting and then tracking whether or not you're keeping up with your plan.

Current status. We have a backlog of 4,786 kits. Since we started dealing with that outsourcing, which was only last September, October, we've outsourced almost 2,700 kits. This is where the math doesn't work, if you remember some of the other numbers, because our backlog … You know, you'd think if you've got a fixed point in time and you counted every kit that's in there, that number should stay the same, go down as you get them done. They find more. I mean, it's just … it was an interesting process.

Like I mentioned, you have to take into account the new rape kits that are coming in the door. So far in 2009, we've been averaging about 26 per week. That's the number of sexual assault kits that are collected associated with crimes in the city of Los Angeles.

Then the next question is — we get this a lot. You're asking for all these people to eliminate your backlog. When the backlog is gone, you know, gone, what are you going to do with them? Well, I can think of something. We might use them for quicker turnaround, more cold cases completed. Maybe we can find more of our detectives that committed crimes 20 years ago.

(Laughter.)

Matheson: For those of you who have heard about that case.

Obviously, we're going to be analyzing every new sexual assault that comes in the door, and we want to do it without outsourcing. We've been outsourcing DNA now for 21, 22 years and would really like to be able to do them in house.

Obviously, we also want to move on to doing more property crimes. We were involved in the NIJ program on that, on the burglaries and DNA. Amazingly effective tool when you're dealing with property crimes like that.

Finally, I find it interesting that … Keep in mind — all of our caseload is request driven except for the sexual assault kits. So everything, we know what our backlog is when it comes to all of the rest of 'em because they're the requests that we have received for analysis.

But what if suddenly somebody comes along, like they've asked, what about all the rest of this biological evidence you have in your freezers associated with homicides? Shouldn't that all be analyzed too? Well, they recently went through and determined that right now there are 42,927 items that are frozen storage that are associated with homicide evidence. We all know all of that is not probative or informative when it comes to the investigation of a crime, but you never know when somebody is going to come along and say, do it anyway. And boy, look at the resources we can get out of that if they force us to consider doing all of the homicide evidence.

And that's it. Thank you very much.

(Applause.)

Kevin Lothridge: If you don't have enough pens, we have NamUs pens right outside the door. So we'll help your budgets also.

Before I get started, I'd like to thank everybody in here for filling out the survey that we did, and we're in the draft phase of the first report to go into NIJ. As in all things, no good deed goes unpunished. I think the reason we got the work is we're really good naggers. We, we kind of call everybody up. And it's kind of the same as Kevin was saying. You know, you have to work together to get this data, and I think we've been doing it for a long time.

Those of you who are old like Greg in the room remember that we did workload surveys for ASCLD years and years and years ago, and they kind of dropped us. And now we're doing all different kinds of data collection. But I would like to thank everybody because it's not easy. If you look at what Greg had to do to get the data that he was required because it was driven, those are some of the same questions people in your agencies ask you every day. And it's not just about one type of evidence. It's about all types of evidence.

And as we go through here, I'm going to talk to you in generalities about the study we did because it is not final. It's preliminary.

I'm also going to apply a personal story at the end and really kind of try to tell a story. I think we do a really good job. We have numbers. We have charts. We have slides up there with lots of things that people can't read. But it's very difficult for people that aren't in the laboratory on a day-to-day basis to make some understanding of that information. They think it should just be done.

Greg made a good point. I think Kevin made a good point. When you take a measurement at one point in time, it's kind of like the wood pile. You think if you take pieces of wood out, it goes away at some point in time, where our wood pile just keeps getting bigger and bigger. It changes because of things that happen. So it is something that's important to remember.

So what's the issue? We know that there's been tons and tons of public attention on the funding that's been provided to the DNA backlog. I think, Mark, you said somebody called you and wanted to know why it wasn't done. Well, there's lots of reasons for that.

And we also have to look at what are the future demands, not just in one section but all the sections. If you look at what Kevin put up there, it looks like we're already 50 percent in the hole in capacity across the board for different types of analysis.

The considerable attention we've paid to this — it's been great. However, there's still evidence awaiting and having delays. I mean, following up Greg, I can't say it any better than he did. He's actually got the numbers. He's in the trenches, and he's actually in the freezer in the parka it looks like.

Why does this backlog exist when we have put capacity to it? It's because it's always changing. There are resource implications, new technology, new rules, new laws, new collection types. And really, the programs that have been developed have tried to look at the DNA backlog and tried to make efficiencies and enhance capacity. But as that's gone on, the desire, the need and the requests for analysis continues to increase.

The study? We did this at the same time that RTI did this for the law enforcement evidence. It's to provide an update on the nature and extent of backlogs in the nation's publicly funded state and local crime laboratories providing DNA analysis.

I was fortunate enough to work with the BJS studies in 2002 and 2005 where, as many of you know, I called you until you filled it out. And we really did the same thing here. We're really trying to provide information not on just the size of the backlog, but also what are the levels of demand. Is the capacity truly there that we think is there? And what's the reliance on funding and, in this case, federal funding?

I think I've not seen anybody present it as well as Greg just did as far as what resources have been put in from the general funds to the federal funds, and I think a novel approach is the donations. That's actually pretty amazing.

And this is still a work in progress. As with all OJP reports, it must undergo peer review. Once the peer review is final, the report will be delivered to NIJ.

What was the methodology? We actually went and looked at all publicly funded crime laboratories and the laboratories accredited by ASCLD and Forensic Quality Services International, the same ones surveyed through the BJA Census of Publicly Funded Crime Labs in 2005. And the final pool of respondents was limited to those laboratories that were accredited and operating DNA analysis programs at that time. We did not look at any federal laboratories or military laboratories providing DNA analysis just to make sure there was no confusion of what we were talking about.

The survey itself was an online form, which we really thought was a good tool. We tried to make it as easy to fill out as possible, but also hoping that the questions would be answerable by the data systems that everybody collects their data in. That's not easy. A question is not always answered the same way. We don't define backlogs the same way. We don't define DNA cases the same way. We don't define forensic biology/serology screening cases the same way. And as I go forward, we'll talk a little bit about that.

We did follow-up communication with the key people in there and did the standard, typical survey model.

Response rate? I have to say this. Each laboratory was asked to fill out the survey individually. However, for many cases, the state lab headquarter laboratory filled out one for the combined state system. Every state laboratory provided a response and a large percentage of local laboratories responded. We were very pleased with the response. It does take time, though. People were like how can it take so long to do a survey. Well, when you ask people and you give them a deadline and the deadline slides and you call them again, that happens. And you have to provide data analysis, and you have to really do a job that nobody really wants to do because it's just another extra task on your plate.

What are the outcomes? Backlogs still exist. That was no surprise. The varying definition of backlog is troubling. I think Greg just did a great job in explaining how their backlog definition changed because it really was those cases that had no report. It wasn't all the cases that most people have. Sometimes you provide services for folks that don't know where their case is. They think they've sent it to the lab. It may not have been sent to the lab. There are some real issues there.

Demand and capacity. I think this is really interesting. The preliminary data shows that almost a doubling of DNA requests between 2005 and 2007. Now, that is actually going along with what Greg said, and not only that. With the low crime rate, your requests are actually increasing. Output has increased to meet the demand at the time but not to reduce the backlog. So if you look at that, the expansion of programs and things are working. It's just that the benchmark keeps changing.

And demand for DNA analysis continues to outpace available capacity. Again, a lot of this is intuitive information. We had to do it with statistics, but I'm not a stats guy. It's pretty simple. If you can only do X number and you get Y, there's going to be a backlog.

And the federal funding. Laboratories reported there will be an increase in backlog cases if federal funding was not available. I think that that's a fair statement. I think Greg would have been in the hole $2 million even with his $1 million worth of donations.

And a large percent of the funding actually was going towards training and equipment. Training has increased greatly. I hate to use Greg as an example, but he had the data just up there. When you add that many people, you got to train them, and the number's gonna increase. The 20 more for next year has another impact on getting more cases out the door as you're doing the training.

The story behind the backlog. I think you have to put these things in proper context. Forensic science in general lacks the capacity to perform cases as they arrive at the lab. Kevin said that the law enforcement agencies had well over 50 percent more items that were not submitted to the laboratory. It's pretty easy to figure out that the capacity is just not enough to even do what we have, let alone the ones that aren't submitted.

Many times they're held for a period of time before they get to the lab so they immediately become a rush case and a backlog occurs. And so they become backlogged.

Here's an example. It's been a while since I ran a crime lab, but I can tell you we did controlled substances and fire debris analysis, mainly chemistry. But in 1985 when crack cocaine hit the streets of Pinellas County, Florida, nobody even thought what was going to happen with that. It really blew up overnight. Our lab moved in 1986 to a new building, so it took time away, and we had cases that were on-hand being held in the locker.

In '87, the lab staff takes other jobs reducing the staff from five to three. So we actually had almost a 50 percent decrease in case-working people.

Increase in law enforcement investigations in the street-dealing of crack cocaine, without consulting the laboratory who was going to receive all those samples, caused a six-month case backlog into 1988. Judges in Pinellas County — if you go query the St. Pete Times, you can look at this. They were kicking the people out the door. They said the lab was woefully understaffed and that this was just a terrible, terrible thing. We needed to get these cases adjudicated.

So we add some resources, like everybody does, hire four new analysts, train them. The backlog returns to 30 days. Total time, even being predictive in something as relatively simple as controlled substance analysis, four years. That's in one small jurisdiction where the median age is now about 53 years old. Back then it was about 63 years old. And that's still a lot of drain.

And when you look at this, you have to put this stuff in proper context. Everybody wants to do every case they possibly can. They want to provide the timely necessary service. At some point in time, the requests outweigh the capacity and these cases are going to be backlogged.

If any of you were in the session earlier, it's actually the NFSTC booth outside the door here, and we have the NamUs program. And when we talk about looking at other backlogs, we do have a huge backlog of missing and unidentified persons cases. Again, it's one of those where we can get the data, get it in, and it's a capacity thing also.

Thanks.

(Applause.)

Nelson: OK, do we have some microphones available for the audience since they may want to ask questions? Do we have any questions, first?

Questioner: I have one question. (Inaudible) one of the things that has bothered me for years, and it has been reiterated many times, and that is there is no universal definitions of backlog. And recently NIJ has made an attempt to do (inaudible) to define what a backlog is. Can any one of you address that and maybe give us some ideas as to how to (inaudible) universal definition back home (inaudible)?

Nelson: OK. For those of you on this side of the room, the question was we don't have a universal definition of a backlog. Does anybody want to take a crack at what a universal backlog might be? How do you define it?

Lothridge: Well, you have to define the terminology first so that you can actually apply it to the backlog, and because we don't say what a case is, what an item is, how things are counted, until we say if it's possible. Now there have been many years — Greg and I were talking to each other just now saying this is something that everybody has asked this exact question. Until you can define the terms that say these are identifiable units, the backlog is going to be what each and every person reports as their own backlog. So you're not going to have a total number as of date certain. You have to get the terminology down right. You have to say what an item is, what a case is, and identify where they're at. I just don't think it can be answered right at the moment.

Matheson: Obviously, I talked about a backlog definition change that we had. I agree. I mean, getting some sort of standardization is very difficult. I would love for somebody to come along and say from now on, you have to call it X, Y and Z. Unfortunately, you know, coming from an agency that has a heck of an ego, they definitely like to call things the way they want to call it unless they're being mandated to do it. You have to figure out a way to get along with other people. So coming up with a standard one is going to be difficult.

But to answer your question, number one, I think it has to be request-based. I mean, obviously, we don't know what exists out there in most areas, and that does actually pertain or go along with our current situation because another way of saying that all of, all of a sudden our backlog became all the kits in the freezer. Another way of saying it is overnight all of those were requested to be analyzed. So if you start on the basis that it's the cases that have been requested to analyze, then decide at what point it no longer is a backlog, which should be at its final state of the analysis, whatever that happens to be.

The final thing is do you count it from the request is made or do you count, give yourself a 30-day or a 60-day? That's something within our laboratory we're actually looking at because many people don't count a backlog the moment a request is made because if it's going to be completed in a timely manner, they don't want that on their books. So a lot of places when it comes to biology, they don't consider it a backlog until it's like 60 days old. And we're considering that.

In our case in narcotics, it becomes a backlog immediately, but as opposed to a lot of other agencies, we have to get the narcotics done within about 48 hours. So we don't carry much of a backlog in that.

Nelson: Does anybody know whether the Foresight Study is addressing this issue? Yes, George?

George: As a participant in the Foresight Study, I can tell you that we've spent days coming up with standardized definitions for what does it take, you know, what is the service request, what is the item to be tested, and what is the backlog. And it's not to say that if it meets any one laboratory's internal definitions, but it allowed a consensus definition that could be used across the North American continent actually.

Nelson: Thank you, George. Tim?

Questioner: This is a question for Kevin Strom. According to IACP, I believe they say there's about 42,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States, and you surveyed about 3,100. Does that mean the true backlog is about 15 or 15 times higher than what you're recording?

Strom: I don't know about the 42,000 in the United States. That may include, you know, many types of specialized police. General estimates are about 17,000 to 18,000 state and local law enforcement agencies, and we surveyed a representative sample of those, which was about 3,000 agencies, and then applied statistical weights to give us a national average.

Questioner: So your numbers were based on what you think is the national average?

Strom: It would be a national total, correct, for state and local agencies.

Nelson: Pat?

Questioner: A question for Greg. Now that you've removed the discretion for sex crimes, why is it not reasonable to then move forward on attempted homicides or homicides and also remove that discretion (inaudible)?

Matheson: My personal opinion? I mean, one of the reasons that the discretion was removed from sexual assault cases had to do with, number one, it was a very easily defined piece of evidence that we could locate within our freezers. I mean, there's some practicality involved in this. It doesn't necessarily involve sexual assault cases at this point where there is no rape kit collected from it. The issue was the sexual assault kits because you could identify those and count them. It also had a very strong and well-organized group of people that are interested in seeing these happen. So the likelihood of another type of analysis getting the same kind of attention from external forces I think is fairly small.

From my own viewpoint, I think it makes less sense because you do need the detective's input to determine whether or not a piece of evidence is informative or probative to the investigation. And not that it isn't important to have their information in the sexual assault kit, but anybody in the room that has ever worked sexual assault investigations, there are so many unknowns, and the victims are reluctant to give information many times, that it almost pays to do the work and then figure out later on what the events were from the evidence as opposed to the other way around.

Nelson: Joe?

Questioner: Kevin, I was curious about your statement. You said that 29 percent of the agencies (inaudible). What does that mean? (Inaudible).

Strom: You know, we didn't really ask for clarification on that particular response. It could have been, in some cases it was for the very small agencies. For example, on the issue of no suspect identified in the case, I think 70 percent of the agencies that responded to that question were very small. So sometimes it's a learning curve at the smaller scale and that could be an issue with that response as well.

Nelson: Go ahead. Lytton?

Questioner: I have to say, as a CODIS state administrator, that I'm confident that the Los Angeles Police Department, local DNA system administrator, would be ensuring that only forensic (inaudible) profiles are coming into our state DNA (inaudible) from this massive undertaking on your part. And I'm serious about that. I know what's going on with you guys, and I trust that. But we've got to understand that we cannot just put any profile that we pull out of a piece of evidence into CODIS. It's got to be (inaudible) forensic (inaudible) profile, and there's a technical definition for what that is and how you figure that out.

Part of it is eliminating other persons, not just consensual partners and so on and so forth.

Matheson: That has been one of our major concerns throughout this whole area, and if you remember — I am going to go back — the review that our detective bureau did of all the kits in the freezer, one of the things that they did was they looked up every single case, either pulled the case package or looked in the automated system, to determine what the status of it is and where the evidence came from and associated pieces of information. That's why we found out that out of that batch, 700-plus were considered to be unfounded, and those won't be analyzed and won't be uploaded. So it definitely was a concern of ours.

And actually, that's one of those areas where we very much appreciate the fact that there are rules out there. I know that at least one of the strong victim advocate groups feel that we shouldn't take that into consideration, but having the law behind us, we can tell them, no, we have to take that into consideration.

Nelson: Barry?

Questioner: (Inaudible.) (Inaudible) a number of our other clients, the smaller police departments throughout the county, were satisfied and happy with that because they (inaudible) property crimes and (inaudible).

One of the solutions that our liaison has been expressing (inaudible) was to allow individual police departments or clusters of police departments to pay for AVLS to work on (inaudible), which creates another whole series of issues for us (inaudible). It's difficult to just turn out fully trained DNA examiners. It's a one- or two-year process (inaudible). We're still struggling with that particular question.

Nelson: So that I understand correctly, are you saying that the local police departments are going to pay to put an analyst in your laboratory to work their cases under your supervision and control?

Questioner: They would be county employees, but funded through municipalities in our jurisdiction.

Nelson: That's an interesting concept.

Yes, sir?

Questioner: Greg, I guess one of my questions — because you spoke very eloquently to the fact that the political pressures that (inaudible) bringing pressures to bear on you. The concept is — and you mentioned this very briefly — that they understand this is all progressive; you're only one small stop. And so you're moving with this, from your widget cost into someone else's widget cost. And when they see the pressures that are going to be applied by them, my point would be in (inaudible) to the prosecutors. Are they going to be prosecuting all of these crimes that you're now working? Because they're going to have to have the same kind of uploading of new prosecutors that you've had (inaudible).

Matheson: You know, I have no idea whether or not, you know, where they're going to go with it, but they will have the same groups watching them that watched us, and maybe they'll be able to get additional resources out of it. Along with the growth in our laboratory, our rape special section or our cold case group in the police department right now has more detectives assigned to just the investigation of these type of cases than anywhere else in the country. So they have received additional resources for exactly that same thing. So I don't know. We'll see.

One of the things that I didn't mention is Joe Peterson from Cal State L.A. is going to be doing a very exhaustive review of the experience that we have, what prosecutions come out of it, how many hits we have, and try and correlate it to the type of evidence that was collected or the type of situations surrounding the crime. So hopefully, by the time we are done with this, and he's done with his study, it will allow other laboratories or other jurisdictions to decide whether or not there's value in analyzing all of the kits or maybe just the kits that fall into a certain category.

We're going to kind of wait and see. In the meantime, we'll be done with our backlog and other people, hopefully, will be able to make some more intelligent decisions than — or more informed decisions — excuse me — than was made in our jurisdiction.

Nelson: Yes, ma'am?

Questioner: I heard something surprising. I was at a (inaudible) training last week. In Massachusetts (inaudible) the vaginal, the genital, (inaudible) rectal (inaudible). And we assume that just testing the vaginal swab, if we got a positive result there, it was a rape case that is done.

And the D.A.s were saying they actually like all of these laws tested, because if they can find, they can bring different charges depending on where they're getting positive results. And they want to stack up as many charges as they can, and some of the charges will get knocked off, and they're hoping that they'll get a sentence for one, a sentence for the other (inaudible).

Does this come into if you have to do four swabs from four different cases, that's four cases off your backlog versus four swabs and that's all in one case?

Matheson: OK, when it comes to the backlog or the previously unrequested or whatever the backlog is, unknown or stranger rapes basically, our goal is to identify that person as quickly as possible. So in other words, the process that we're doing to analyze these kits, the stranger ones, is to have them start working their way through the items until they find foreign DNA from the victim and stop at that point. That then can be uploaded, if it meets the rest of the criteria in the CODIS.

If we get a hit and they move on to prosecution, then it's entirely likely that that kit will then become a new request. It will come back to the laboratory, and all the rest of the items will be analyzed to determine whether or not there's additional charges. But the first round through is justifying something foreign and get that uploaded into CODIS.

Nelson: Any other questions?

(No response.)

Nelson: Join me in thanking our panelists today. I think they've done a great job.

(Applause.)

William A. Ford: This project is getting better and better every year. This came out of an idea of a lack of content and a lack of information between the forensic community, law enforcement, courts, corrections and that whole information sharing.

My name is Bill Ford. I'm with the National Institute of Justice. We have two great officers or two great labs that are here who, as I call them, willing victims. The way this product has moved to where it is is because we've had buy-in from the community to make this better.

So, with that, this started off with an idea … let me backtrack a little second. No, that was perfect. That was perfect because the idea of the National Information Exchange Model, which is a joint DHS, Homeland Security and Department of Justice initiative, to come up with that standardized language to share information, that's great, big data model out there in the sky.

We work with actually another effort, our next slide, which is Global Justice Information Sharing System, which is a FACA program that reports to the Attorney General. The major associations and criminal justice have the voice to inform the Attorney General, going, “Hey, there's this gap. Please address it.”

I'm very fortunate with inside the Office of Science Technology that I can also assemble a group of individuals and go, “What are your challenges? What do we need to go after?” So we assembled, as I call them, 15, 20 guys and gals with guns or whose paycheck says “the city of” or “the state of” and asked that question, and with that, then we get to turn around and do targeted-type implementations such as this.

This is what FIDEX came from, the Forensic Information Data Exchange model. Aaron is a wonderful person. We've met many years ago in the sense of global, and when Mike and his team teamed up with Aaron, we went, “We got this done.” If you want to speak XML, this guy speaks XML.

So, with that, I'm going to turn it over to Aaron and let him give you an idea of where we are with FIDEX.

Aaron Gorrell: Thanks, Bill. I promise not to speak in XML today. I saw the sugar out there and I'd be fairly incomprehensible on a good day.

So just a little bit of background about FIDEX, or Forensic Data Exchange: What NIJ was looking at … as you know, NIJ has spent somewhere around $330 million in their ongoing effort to try to reduce case backlog in crime laboratories. What they wanted to do is take a look at new and innovative ways to reduce backlog instead of relying on the concept of providing money to labs to hire additional analysts or to outsource certain kinds of examinations.

We wanted to look at fundamentally changing the equation to figure out is there a way to reduce backlog without actually doing the examination, which seems like heresy until you start looking at it and doing some of the analysis that we've done with the IJIS Institute, and you start talking to crime laboratories and find out, and it varies from crime lab to crime lab, anywhere from 50 percent to 80 percent of the cases in their backlog have already been disposed.

And so we started taking a look at is there a possibility for getting information sharing going on between the courts and the district attorney and the crime labs in order to identify those cases and in order to be able to identify those cases to potentially cancel the examinations if there's no longer any need — if they've pled out or if the case has been adjudicated or whatever has happened.

So that's where it started off is as a standards development effort to develop standards for court software solution providers to be able to feed information into the crime lab or for law enforcement software providers or in-house providers to be able to share information with the forensic crime lab.

And it ended up culminating in a couple of pilot projects, one with Boston Police Department and the other with Phoenix Police Department. Now, as Bill said, in terms of how we kind of envision the format of this presentation, we do want to kind of make it informal, as informal as you can when you have 100 of your closest friends in a gigantic field-sized room here.

So at the conclusion of each speaker, please feel free to speak up and ask any questions, and then our plan is to allow 15 minutes or so at the end of the presentations to also discuss it.

So our first panelist, Mike O'Berry, is the National Forensic Science and Technology Center program manager, and essentially he's the one who kept us in alignment and frankly made sure I got paid. So Mike is going to kind of give you a little bit of background information on the project, how it initiated and some of the steps that the NFSTC did in order to get the project off the ground and continue the project.

Michael O'Berry: The National Forensic Science Technology Center worked with the National Institute of Justice through a cooperative agreement on FIDEX. So I have to say that right upfront or Bill will kick me in the shin.

The program funding came through, obviously, the Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, and the NFSTC was originally established through the American Society of Crime Lab Directors in 1995. So it's been around for quite a while, and we provide a lot of different services to the criminal justice community.

The NFSTC is located down in Largo, Florida. That's Tampa Bay, basically, and you can see that we have a number of services that we provide through the NFSTC: training, technical assistance and evaluation, obviously criminal justice, community support. The labs are one of our main focus, but we've obviously branched out into crime scene investigation training, firearms, impression evidence. There are a number of training projects that we support and deliver.

The vision is for the forensic science community and its users to have complete confidence in the quality of science provided by the justice community, so … I'm sorry, to the justice community. Our mission is that we are dedicated in assisting forensic scientists in achieving the highest level of quality services for the justice community. So you can see that we have a broad vision and a focus in terms of services for the justice community.

The advisory group for FIDEX and drilling down to the specific project was a national group established in 2007 that helped scope and helped us understand the needs, issues, and we've put together a pretty diverse group. The outcomes from the national working group were forensic case-related justice information would be captured and shared in an interoperable, uniform, scalable format, which is mumbo jumbo for case information being shared between crime labs, law enforcement and the courts.

The pre-login examination requests were the main focus. What we realized through surveys and focus group members was that there was a big need for the time spent in communication related to case submission, to reduce that and to provide multilevel communication, evidence-related information in the same format and make it accessible to all the different users.

The FIDEX partners for the working group included the Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, NIJ, NFSTC executive members and our staff, IJIS Institute, the Arizona Criminal Justice Commission, ACJC.

As you can see, Justice tracks LIMS. So, for those of you — how many people in here are familiar with Laboratory Information Management Systems? OK, great. So we tried to include vendors and people who are involved with the technology that would be linked to FIDEX — Waterhole Software, obviously, Evidence Tracker — and the pilot sites initially included Boston Police Department and Phoenix Police Department crime lab.

So the partners played a big role in what we're doing and how we drilled down to the Arizona subgroup. The Arizona Criminal Justice Commission was gracious enough to support a subgroup so that we could study work flow in Arizona between local, county, and state crime labs and law enforcement agencies, and that became a big part of what we did to make the FIDEX case exchanges practical for users.

So that's really all I have to say about the NFSTC and kind of in a very short story how we arrived here and supporting FIDEX with a cooperative agreement with the NIJ.

Kevin Kosiorek: Good afternoon. My name's Kevin Kosiorek, and I'm a criminalist with the Boston Police crime lab. And we are a relatively small forensic group; at least, I consider us a small agency, small forensic group when I look at labs like Michigan State Police and L.A. County.

But, about a year ago, that's when I met Aaron, and he was in our police department for a meeting with some of our command staff regarding the FIDEX system. And, you know, one of my coworkers and I, we were basically ordered to attend this meeting. I don't know how many of you out there are actively working cases in a crime lab, but wherever you're working, the caseload is typically pretty great, and, you know, we weren't too happy about having to go to this meeting. But we reluctantly went and we heard what Aaron had to say, and I immediately was very excited about the possibility of FIDEX and incorporating it into our lab.

We have a number of items of evidence that are handled by our forensic group each year. This is just, you know, some of the numbers. Just in the crime lab alone, over 3,600 items of evidence have already come in through our evidence receiving window in about five months. So we handle a lot of items. You know, there are labs out there that are much bigger, but just with the number of people that we have in the lab, 20 people handling about 3,000 items of evidence, it is a lot of evidence coming in each day.

Another thing about working in the Boston lab is that we do work with one agency. So we primarily work for the Boston Police Department as well as some of the colleges and universities, and also we work with one district attorney's office, which is the Suffolk County district attorney's office, which, basically, Boston is Suffolk County, if you're from Massachusetts.

But, again, going back to this meeting, we reluctantly went to this meeting and we heard what Aaron had to say about FIDEX, and we, you know, we, along with virtually every forensic lab in the country, there is that breakdown in communication between the forensic scientists, the DA's office and the detectives in charge of the case, and there usually isn't that free flow of information.

But one thing that we would probably all agree on is that the crime labs or the forensic units in general have a lot of information that both sides want, and really how do you get that information to everybody and make everyone happy?

Some of the things that we were concerned with when we met with Aaron for the first time is just the redundancy of having to enter in more information into another system. Our lab, currently you have to enter each case into an Excel spreadsheet. We also have an electronic evidence tracking system, which is not a LIM system, and then we also have a number of other different spreadsheets that are kind of optional — “optional” in quotes — for you to enter in your information. So we were really concerned with is this going to take us a lot of time to enter in this information again and again and again and is there any way that we can kind of minimize the amount of places where we have to put it in.

Again, the first meeting we had was just to hear what his proposition was and for the business model, but we were very excited at the end when he said that he could … pretty much, once you enter in the incident number, you could have your preferences set up, and it would be the same for every case.

Another thing about our meeting, our second meeting when Aaron came back to discuss just how FIDEX was going to work: At this point, we had a member of the command staff, a deputy superintendent and a veteran homicide investigator attend this meeting. This meeting was actually very interesting because you could see that there was immediately going to be a tug of war for information between the DA's office, the crime lab and the detectives in charge of the case. Pretty much, the detectives were concerned with, you know, if the DAs or ADAs, assistant district attorneys, have access to all of our evidence information, who is going to be the one to, you know, request evidence examinations, and if the assistant district attorneys are allowed to do that, will it cut them out of the loop, because although we do have a very good, strong working relationship together, you know, when a detective works nights, the district attorney works days, sometimes the communication, there's a breakdown and it falls apart, so we want to try and avoid that.

So what we agreed was that we would have FIDEX set up just internally where the detectives could be involved in viewing what FIDEX has to offer, and the crime lab would be basically in charge of who would be allowed to access FIDEX with each case.

When we're entering in evidence after each case comes in, if it's a big case, let's say a homicide where we have hundreds of items of evidence, the forensic group is broken down into the crime lab, the latent print section, the firearms section and the crime scene response unit. All of those units are entering in their evidence simultaneously, which can be very difficult. So you really don't know what evidence you have in the case until several weeks after, and you also don't know where it's going to be located.

You can go in and you can look through our evidence tracking system, but, again, there's just so much per volume of evidence per case that it can make it very difficult.

So what we wanted to avoid was basically, you know, if the latent fingerprint unit is generating items of evidence, how are we going to know what is going to be submitted to us later on, and if the crime scene response unit is doing the same and the firearms section, you know, we need a heads-up as to what is being generated and where it's going to be stored and also if it's going to be arriving in the lab at some point.

OK. So, when we're working with the detectives, too, and there's that general fear over who is going to have access, there are a couple of things that we were concerned with, working in the lab, that the detectives weren't necessarily thinking about, so we had concerns of our own, and some of those were the e-mails. If you're working in a lab and you communicate with the detectives or the district attorney's office through e-mails, you know, sometimes there's different subject matter in the e-mail that you would rather not be a part of your case file.

You know, for instance, we work with a very small agency. We generate some pretty good relationships, working relationships and personal relationships with the detectives. If you're out having a few cocktails one night, you don't really want that in the e-mail of “How is my case going? Oh, you know, by the way, it was a great time at the bar last night.” So we try to avoid those situations.

The detectives sometimes don't realize that we're documenting all that, even though we specifically say we keep a contact log of any time you request an examination that goes in the case file, but, again, that's something that we want to avoid. So we want to avoid having the e-mails being, you know, part of the case file. That's one excellent thing about FIDEX is that when you're using FIDEX — and you're going to have a demonstration later in this — Aaron is going is show you the simplicity of the e-mails is perfect. Basically, it shows you the case number, the incident number for your agency as well as a brief description of what the item of evidence is.

Now, if you're having an evidence request, the e-mail is also going out with just the general evidence request. So you're eliminating all that personal information. That way, if you do want to exchange e-mails with the detective and decide where you're going out for drinks that weekend, you don't have to have it be in part of the case file, which is something that I personally really like. It's just having the simplicity of the e-mails.

Now, with the district attorney's office, there was another concern that if the district attorney's office was requesting different examinations for our evidence, that what happens later on in the case if they request something, because we have a lot of new district attorneys or assistant district attorneys that will ask for specific items to be tested, not really knowing what type of testing we offer, not really having a forensic background whatsoever. So what if they're asking for something inappropriate and all of a sudden this is discoverable and, you know, we didn't perform the test that they asked? I don't know how it works with everybody else in the country, but I'm assuming it's pretty much the same. You know, when you go through discovery or discovery requests and the defense gets a copy of your case file, they do look at all your correspondence with the detectives and the district attorney's office, and they want to see are you following up on the different examinations that were requested. So that was one of the concerns.

I personally don't see that as being a concern because you can always explain that a case is … basically, it's a living thing, and you're discussing different types of examinations that are going to take place, and then you may have new information develop. And then, all of a sudden, those previous requests are not really relevant. But that was something that the detectives were concerned with.

So right now we use FIDEX pretty much internally for the e-mail notifications on evidence, but I would like to speak a little bit about that.

We get a lot of evidence in, and a lot of units within the police department have access to our evidence tracking system. Evidence may be split off an existing item where it's been … basically, it's called a “new item of evidence.”

When I send something to the latent fingerprint section, what happens is, you know, they may swab the mouth of a bottle area, and I want to know where are they in the process of examining that item of evidence. Well, I will get an e-mail notification — it's three lines long — that just says that a swab has been generated and now that is a part of the evidence.

Now, I personally really like this because it really has eliminated a lot of the confusion for me where I have to go and diligently check, you know, and try and find out what items of evidence had been created and when they were created, because, you know, you have a big caseload, you know, you have hundreds of cases that you're working on, from, you know, the current cases all the way to cold cases, and it's hard to keep track. You may have a thousand Post-It Notes on your desk. This is one way of eliminating that because you're just getting an e-mail notification, and it'll kind of bring it to the front of your mind, so that you're now going to work on that case.

We've had a lot of success stories, too, with using the FIDEX system. We've had a number of criminalists that have asked to be part of using FIDEX. Initially, there was a lot of hesitation because, you know, it's entering data into another system, but we've had one criminalist in particular where she was waiting for oral swabs for a breaking-and-entering case.

She was working a large number of these cases, and she was waiting weeks for this oral swab to come in. Little did she know that the swab had been submitted. It was just, you know, not a procedural error but kind of an oversight that the receipt wasn't placed in a place where she could see it on her desk, and a deadline was pretty much missed for court. So that has completely eliminated, you know, missing the deadlines by using FIDEX and using, you know, what it has to offer for the notifications.

Now, what we really don't use FIDEX for currently in the lab is for our statistics. You know, it seems to be a recurring theme throughout the conferences that statistics are, you know, more and more important each day. Your commissioners and your police chiefs want to know exactly what's going on in the lab. They want more accountability. You know, they want all of this information regarding what are you doing with your time and how are you processing evidence and reducing backlogs.

But you can use FIDEX for this purpose. We haven't used it yet for this purpose because it's really taken me a while to convince some of my coworkers to get into the FIDEX mindset, and now since there have been some issues with potentially missing deadlines, I've convinced them.

And actually, since going and preparing for this conference and preparing a little lecture, I went over to some of the other units, such as the latent fingerprint section and the firearms section, and I was just kind of telling them what I was gathering data for specifically with the amount of items we collect, and they were really upset that I haven't allowed them to use FIDEX yet, which I think they're forgetting that we had this conversation about a year ago and nobody really wanted to talk about it.

[Laughter.]

Kosiorek: But, really, when I go back now, now I have an audience that is going to listen to me, and they're going to be very interested in using FIDEX. So there isn't enough that I can say about FIDEX and how it could work. Having gone through a couple of the seminars here in the last couple of days, you know, talking about the backlogs in Michigan and then in L.A. County, this would be a perfect tool for those two agencies, you know, for looking at workload as well as just figuring out where cases are in your system.

And it's so simple to use. Really, once you have your preferences set, all you have to do is enter in your case number. It works by itself. It basically aggregates all of that information. So, you know, I really just can't say enough, but Aaron is going to show you a demonstration later.

Anybody have any questions first? Yes.

Audience Member 1: What is … how does it handle emergency or ASAP cases?

Kosiorek: Well, we haven't really used it for the request for examination as of right now, but, I mean, you'll have a request for an examination. I guess Aaron might be able to touch on that.

Aaron Gorrell: Sure, Dr. [inaudible]. You know, it really depends on what your business process is for those kinds of emergency examinations. The tool, when we developed the tool, and I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit, but one of the things that we discovered is every crime lab has a little bit different business process in terms of requesting examinations and so on and so forth, so one of the first requirements we had was whatever tool we built can't force any kind of business process down an agency's throat.

But what we did find is that there's a high degree of consistency with the kind of information that they're capturing. So, you know, I don't know your specific process for requiring the emergency requests. I would say because everything is real time with the software, it should be able to be configured to meet business requirements.

Kosiorek: I just want to say one more thing, because I had a note and I forgot to say it. In September of last year, our latent fingerprint section was accredited by ASCLD and the DA's office. Well, the district attorney, Dan Conley, he came in and gave a little speech, you know, for the accreditation ceremony. And he basically put out a number. He said I just want to congratulate the latent fingerprint unit in their accreditation because we've had successful prosecution in 85 percent of our gun cases.

And that's one thing that I would like to see happen in the future, is to have the court system, because that's really what it's ideally designed for, is to get everybody involved — the courts, the detectives, as well as the crime lab. You know, we don't know the disposition of a lot of our cases and that's something that we really need to have the courts help us out with by allowing us to have access to their system.

I know that in our court system they're, I believe, going through a process in the next few months where they're going to be implementing new technology there, or a new system, so I think we have to wait for that to take place before we can go back and ask them to allow us to have access.

But, you know, we're sitting there in disbelief that, wow, 85 percent of our cases are ending up in a successful prosecution. That would be really nice to know as it's happening and being able to look at these items and say, “OK, fine, we don't have to examine this because it's already gone forward and the person took a plea,” or, you know, “Yes, it is moving forward, and they need our results in order to, you know, maybe reach a plea deal or go forward with trial.”

So, any other questions?

Audience Member 2: I wanted to know … two questions, actually. Is this available for all forensic units in full-service forensic labs, not just DNA, I would assume?

Gorrell: Yes. When I show you a demonstration it's going to show how it can be used across any kind of examination types with any types of evidence, quite frankly.

Audience Member 2: And then to take it one step further, and perhaps you'll touch on it. Is it also available for the DA's office or I guess information to be inputted on their end as far as offender and arrestee collections from various sites to ensure that the sample has been provided and then submitted to the forensic lab?

Gorrell: Absolutely. The application is a Web-based application, so as long as you can get to the server, the physical server through your network to access the Web page, and you've been given authority to be able to view the case, you being the specific ADA or detective or criminalist, you can add it, you can update it, we can set up rules about what fields you can update based on your role.

Audience Member 3: I was wondering, do you guys assign cases to your specific analysts so the e-mails get sent to you directly? Or do they get sent to everybody?

Kosiorek: That's a good question. Actually, you set up your rules. You'll have an administrator that can assign cases and once they list you as the case analyst, you'll get a notification — again, three lines long — saying that this case has been assigned to you. And then, as the analyst, you'll have the authority to then include detectives that are involved in the case, so you may want to include specific investigators, maybe an investigator and their supervisor depending on how your agency works. And then you can also include people from the DA's office, so you can actually input various e-mail addresses and include whoever you'd like. And that's the beauty of it, is that, whoever is involved in the case, but you as the crime lab analyst will have the authority to do that.

Audience Member 3: OK. So do you find that you're inundated with e-mails? It sounds like a lot of e-mailing. I mean, do you have to sort through them? I mean, how does that…

Kosiorek: It depends on the case, you know. If I have a case where there are a couple hundred items, I will notice that I will get flooded with e-mails when latent fingerprints starts examining, like, a case of beer bottles and they start swabbing all the bottles and splitting those items. But it's still very good to know because I know that all of those items are going to eventually come across my desk.

But I'm not really flooded right now because I'm using it in kind of a small population. When I get back, and now that I have more interest, it's going to be much bigger. But I don't foresee it as being a burden, it's really more of a heads-up, you know. I may have a list of 10 e-mails and I'll flip through them just to see what is being processed and just to see where each item is in the chain, but it's really not bad at all.

Audience Member 4: My question has to do with the storage of electronic data and the discovery issues that come along with that. So how are discovery issues handled with this data?

Kosiorek: Well, we haven't really had a discovery issue yet, but if there was a question, I mean, I could always go back and print out the e-mail notification. The requests for analysis … if a detective is going to request an analysis, usually what happens is they're already submitting the item to us, so we're having an evidence submission form. So usually that information is the same. I guess if it were different, then I would have to print it out, but really we haven't had that issue.

Gorrell: Yeah, and one of the reasons we actually developed the tool so that you can actually take an electronic version of the report or pdf or whatever and attach it to that record within FIDEX. And Boston PD for a lot of reasons, just like what I think you're talking about, decided they didn't want to do that and so for the specific results of the examination, you can just not use that feature, that capability, and actually disable it.

Jim Markey: Thank you very much for this opportunity. I'd like to thank NIJ, NFSTC, Waterhole Software for giving me this chance to come up here and speak.

I'm an investigator. I use information and exchange it with other units as a team all the time, and so I've never been accused of looking backwards. I'm always looking forwards. So, when I saw the initial presentation of FIDEX, probably about a year ago, I was thinking, “Hey, you know, that's great for the lab; that's wonderful; they're going to be able to organize themselves with the prosecutor, hopefully, but what about me? What's that going to do for my investigations?” And I'm going to go through … I'm going to outline some major cases that we worked where information exchange was good and some things weren't so good, and then I'm going to talk a little bit about cold case and where I think a project like this would fit into cold case as well.

I'd like to talk about … or I should say the information that I'm going to share about two of the cases that I'm going to talk about, they're public record. One of them, the individual is still going to trial at the end of this year for about eight murders. So it is public information, and so anything that I share with you is already out there in the public media as well.

So, if you want to play that first clip.

[Video clip presentation begins.]

Eight homicides, five sexual assaults, 10 kidnappings.

Tonight, Phoenix Police are finally saying “case solved.”

This man never again should be able to walk the streets of this valley or anywhere else in freedom.

The evidence that we used to review these cases consists of forensic evidence, physical evidence and circumstantial evidence. All of this evidence points directly to Mark Goudeau as the one who's committed these crimes.

Police say they received 8,000 tips, interviewed 3,500 people and followed up on 2,500 pieces of information. Not once did they come up with anyone but Goudeau. Still, his attorney says his client didn't do it.

[Video clip presentation ends.]

Markey: I don't know if you caught those numbers that were put out there, and that's one of many investigations that we had going at the time that became an information and management nightmare.

A good friend of mine, Ritchie Martinez, who is the president of the International Association of Law Enforcement Analysts, told me one time, “You know what, Jim, failing to manage your information will fail your investigation every time,” and he's absolutely right.

And so I learned that lesson a long time ago. Some of it was the hard way and some of it, I think, as we look towards the future, we can manage this information much better.

You know, I did a couple presentations and I talked about all the crimes, serial crimes that we've had in Phoenix, and somebody came up after the presentations, says, “I don't really want to come to Phoenix.”

[Laughter.]

Markey: And I thought it was because of Senate Bill 1070 that they were boycotting, but, apparently it's because we do have some issues.

Since I've been in the sex crimes unit since 1998, we have logged well over 60 serial rape suspects that we've investigated and arrested and prosecuted most of those.

These three folks right here … and I'm going to talk about David Wilson at the top, Mark Goudeau on the left and the serial shooter case. You can Google any of those, and there's so much information on the Internet, but, unfortunately for us, those three cases were occurring all at the same time. They totaled about right around 20 murders and probably somewhere in the vicinity of 20 rapes between those four individuals that we were trying to manage with three different investigative units. And guess where all that evidence and all that information was getting funneled to. The crime lab. So you talk about resources and you talk about having to manage your resources. I'll talk a little bit later on about middle management and my term that I use for that.

Some things, you just … Hollywood can't write a better script. When we finally arrested Dave Wilson, we found out a bunch of things that we knew and really didn't know and then came to find out later on he was the son of a sergeant on our police department, and the unit that picked him up the night that we were doing surveillance, because we were managing our information in our crime analysis unit, was the same unit that his dad had just transferred out of as a supervisor.

So, about a month before he had left this unit, we picked him up that night on a trespassing, and then when we went to do the search warrant on his car, we looked at his license plate. And what does that say to you? That's not Dr. Jekyll's. He laughed about that. He goes, “Oh, you think that says 'Dr. Jekyll's.'” That's D.J. and Kelsey, his two kids. So, as he would go out as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and commit these crimes, he would go back to his two children. So Hollywood can't write these things sometimes any better.

So we had to manage a lot of information, and our resources were very limited. It took a long time to get the wheels of the investigative process moving to where I knew we needed assistance, but I had to be able to go to these other units and convince them, with this information, we have some solid ideas of what we want to do.

We started to see patterns in our crime analysis of where he had tendencies of areas that he liked to commit his sexual assaults in, and so we were able to manage our resources, and we had — at this point, we had five different surveillance teams in five different apartment complexes, including the apartment complex that he lived in, which … managing just that part of the investigation, you have to understand the apartment complex he lived in has its own zip code. That's how big this place was.

And so we used information. We used crime analysis, and we used just some good old-fashioned gumshoe work and ended up with Mr. Wilson one night in one of our surveillance areas. But this is the old school of how we would manage all of these sexual assault examination kits and any other evidence that was funneling through the lab. We didn't have a communication system that we could access in real time. We were having meetings every day. We would include everybody in these meetings, and I'll talk about working one of these major cases and the amount of information that gets shared or doesn't get shared and how that impacts your case.

But, as you can see, on the right-hand side, we were getting a lot of elimination samples from a lot of folks, and so we wanted to have that information back in real time, because, if we have a surveillance team following one of our leads around, we want to know as quickly as we could can we pull those resources away from that individual because we know that's not him. We were very fortunate in this case because we were getting DNA samples from those sexual assault kits that were early on linking these cases together, so they weren't hunches. It was actual solid information from the cases that was allowing us to link this together.

And then we wanted to know who would screen it, and we would be able to go to that person and say, you know, “What items were screened? What items weren't screened?” We actually went line by line through these sexual assault kits. You know, they show up as one item usually when they get impounded and go to property, but when you open them up at the lab, I've seen as many — and I am sure you have, too — as many as 30, 35 different items inside the kit, depending on the circumstances of the case and how the nurse did the examination.

So it became tracking this information nightmare, and then we had to work — when we finally arrested him, we had to exchange and we had to work information with our Maricopa County attorney's office. So we had to sit down with them, and we went through basically department report by department report, and we identified every count of sexual assault, kidnapping, everything we could on each one of those cases. And this is how we tracked it. This is how we exchanged the information. This is actually — with my notes, this is actually one of the original pieces of paper they used for charging when it went to grand jury on this, and as you can see, we ended up with about 60-some counts on this individual.

And then we had Mark Goudeau. It was interesting. The night that we arrested David Wilson, Mark Goudeau was on the west side of Phoenix raping two sisters at a park. We didn't know that at the time because all of our resources were concentrating on this big arrest, with the media and everybody getting their ties on and their badges polished so they could go in front of the cameras.

But he was out doing his second rape, and we were able to link those fairly early on basically through his MO. What we didn't know in the end is, retrospect, looking back at the crimes that he was committing became a very daunting task of trying to manage the information from not only homicides, armed robberies, sexual assaults, but a homicide that was outside our jurisdiction that happened in Tempe. It was one of his first homicides.

We kind of got caught in the middle on this one. The information started flowing in as far as leads and tips and other types of communication that we weren't prepared to handle at the time. We didn't have a database. We didn't have a tracking system. It was one of these on the fly, can we develop something, go down to our IT people, can you give us something, because we're already behind the curve. And so it became very important for us to try to manage this to see where we were, what we had and where we were going to go with this investigation.

Again, we started using the crime mapping, the crime analysis to try to identify the areas in which he would have a tendency to maybe go back and offend. This is the first time in my 28 years … my sister-in-law ended up living a quarter mile from where he lived, and he had committed … up in the upper right-hand corner, off of 32nd Street and Thomas. She lived at 33rd Street and Thomas. And it was the first time in my 28-year career, I told my family, “Do not go out of your house between the hours of 7 p.m. and 10 p.m.,” because that was his prime time. That's what he liked. That's when he had some free time to do whatever he needed to do.

We were 15 minutes away of preventing probably seven murders. We had one surveillance guy that, for whatever reason, he took an interest in our unit when we were trying to get resources and we couldn't. And he said, “I'll tell you what, what are you guys thinking?” We said, “We think he's going to be up around 32nd Street and Thomas.” He sat there. He was part of the SWAT team. He sat there and he got a call out. He had to go to a barricade. Ten minutes later, our suspect commits an armed robbery shooting and attempt kidnapping a female.

I can guarantee you that if Billy Clark, who's the surveillance officer who was there, he would have killed him, and we would have ended anything because he has a tendency to be a really, really good shot.

[Laughter.]

Markey: That's why we put him there because that was the only way … you know, he was either going to be dead or he was going to kill somebody, and, obviously, he decided to start killing people.

The other thing about information is the night that he raped the two girls — and we'll talk about the two sisters in the park — patrol ended up taking disposition on that, and they thought they had found the crime scene. Well, we brought them back in the next day for a comprehensive interview with one of our sex crimes investigators, and we realized they probably didn't have the right location. And so we went back out and we found the location, and we actually identified additional evidence at that location. So now we have more evidence that we have to try to track, and that was very critical in the prosecution's case that they wanted to show to the jury. And, you know, we had to say, hey, you know, we missed it the first time, but we went out and got it the second time. So, when you're talking about these major cases, you know, you're talking about managing resources. You're talking about managing people, and, really, you know, managing people is more like leading people, I would say.

You know, you manage things, production, output, but really team building, communication, that's what managing people is all about. But you can't do any of that unless you manage your information and everybody is on the same page and has access to the same information and everybody is heading in the right direction, and that becomes difficult at times.

So, when you're managing information, especially in one of these cases, you know, tips, leads, evidence, communication becomes so critical, and so how do you overcome those types of issues? I don't know if there is the pie in the sky that's going to solve every communication issue, every management issue of information out there, but I can tell you at least we're heading in the right direction. At least we're looking at solutions that I think can be applied to a variety of situations that we all get involved in.

So this would be a typical communication breakdown or a communication task force of how it would be developed. Can you imagine trying to manage all the individuals that are assigned to each one of those little boxes as well as the information that's being exchanged? I mean, somebody would tell me something at a meeting, and the next day I'd never remember it. You know, it wasn't getting documented, and it wasn't getting exchanged. It wasn't getting massaged. You know, we weren't mining the data like we should have been at that stage.

And this is my futile attempt at PowerPoint stuff. You know, so you set up a war room, and now you've got a major case and you've got all this information, this data, and you've got all this evidence and the stuff flowing in, but what actually happens to it? When you break it down, where does that information go? Someone has to deal with it, right? Eight thousand tips. So how do you deal with 8,000 tips with the fear that the one tip that's in there that you don't do appropriate follow-up on is your suspect, and he goes out and commits an additional crime?

So, you know, when you think about, well, managing this information, well, there's got to be a process to do it, and we set up a little process basically when the information came in, no matter how it came in, this is how it worked, this is how it flowed, and, hopefully, we were able to identify, assess the good information and filter out the bad information that was not for us. Of course, sometimes you just don't know what happened in a case, and that's why we have homicide detectives.

I'll talk a little bit about cold case. We started in 2000 with a VAWA grant, and we have developed for the last 10 years a database, internal database to track this information.

I'd throw him in there because his name is Jack Russell. I know that seems ironic, but he committed several sexual assaults in Phoenix and then fled to El Paso, Texas.

But here you have a team, and how can you be a team if you don't communicate and understand the information that each other has and how it's important to share that with other folks? You cannot be successful in a team without the exchange of data, information, talking to each other, being able to look at archived data and massage it and pull out the stuff that's appropriate and that you need in your investigation or your prosecution or in the crime lab to test.

And so, you know, you're a team, and you may not meet as a team, per se, but you're all supposed to be heading in the same direction. You're supposed to be moving towards the goal, and the only way to do that is to have this information available to everybody.

So, when you're talking about cold case information management … you know, we talk about how we set up our team. We just didn't shotgun everything to the lab … well, we kind of did, and then they panicked, and we gave them a body from our unit and said, here, use this person to screen some of these kits that we had back in 2000 and 2001. But we went through our case. We reviewed our cases. We put them into a database, and we were able to track our leads, timelines, milestone dates on evidence, on talking to leads. I'll show you one of the screens we had.

This is a very simple database that really is outdated at this point, but we continue to use it because, at this point, we're looking for options. We're looking for something in the future. You know, you need to track and review evidence and identify where your backlogs are, and as that evidence moves through your system, one of the questions that my detectives get asked when they go to grand jury on these cold cases is the grand jury wants to know timelines, OK, when was that kit obtained, when was it sent to the lab, when was it examined, when did you get the CODIS hit. They want dates, and then, of course, the last question is “Why did it take so long?” And then my detectives have to sit there and try to explain the process to the grand jury, but they're asking these questions. We wouldn't have that information unless we were able to track it effectively.

You know, the other thing is statistics. You know, every time we would get a grant, we would have new requirements to provide statistical recap of what we accomplished. You know, people are giving us money. They have a right to know what we did with that money, and we should be able to give them numbers and explain exactly how that money was used and what it was used for, and, hopefully, they're successful numbers.

You know, we're looking for a process to link cases, to look at series and analyze those series for information that can be shared by a team and accessed by a team. You have to trust each other on that team that that information is going to be used as part of that investigation. You know, these cases are cold for a reason, and now we have to go back and bring them alive again.

So that's just one of our basic admin sheets. You know, I can look at this and I can tell you that we have available evidence, and I can also tell you if there's DNA on a suspect. There's a typical identified suspect offender in one of our cases.

So, I guess, you know, I'm saying we need to be prepared. We need to look to the future because I'm not going to be here in 10 years doing this, but I want to leave it for somebody, that it's not a mess that they have to clean up, that they have to start all over from scratch. We're here doing the job now. We need to ensure that we're doing it effectively and efficiently and managing this information for really the future.

Don't become a middle manager. You know, when you're at 30,000 feet in an airplane, that's not the time to think about “We should've built a better airplane.” It's too late; you're up in the air. And that usually is what happens. We manage by crisis. The crisis is going to be here.

There was a presentation last week at the death symposium in Scottsdale, and they were talking about 9/11, you know, how much information, pieces of data, millions and millions of pieces of data that they had to track, everything from forensic information to lead information to dealing with families. They had to build something on the fly. Don't put yourself in that position. It's very hard to get your administration to look at this as a real issue.

I'm sure you have been in a jurisdiction where they've had some sort of plane crash, you know, with mass fatalities, where now you've got to manage all that, not just the crime scene but manage all that information that's occurring on the fly.

Know where you're going in order to get there.

[Video clip presentation begins.]

According to police, he terrorized the valley for months. Tonight, the accused baseline killer, Mark Goudeau, knows how long he'll spend behind bars for the sexual assault of two sisters.

Mark Goudeau in court, as he's sentenced to 438 years in prison. Here's an idea of how long that is: Four hundred thirty-eight years ago, in 1569, William Shakespeare was just 5 years old, and the first colony in the United States would not be settled for another 38 years.

[Video clip presentation ends.]

Markey: Amazing what the media will come up with.

[Laughter.]

Markey: What does William Shakespeare have to do with a serial rapist and murderer?

You know, I'm really proud of the teamwork and the cooperation. We made it through this crisis, and the case, the information, the lab work, it withstood a very vigorous defense in trial and convicted him 438 years, and that's really what we're working for.

And I thank you very much.

[Applause.]

Aaron Gorrell: One of the times that Jim and I have talked, one of the things that he talked about specific to information management is when you look at your relationship with the community and the relationship with the media, one of the things that he stressed for me is that relationship is not going to be based on the work that you do on a regular basis, all the successes that you have on a day-to-day basis, the, quote/unquote, “simpler cases.”

It ends up being judged by those major cases, those ones that have thousands of pieces of evidence, and whether or not you manage that effectively and efficiently goes in large part to determining how the public and how the media, how successful they view you.

We view FIDEX and the version that you're going to see and the version that Kevin has been using and that Mike has been using, Jim has been using — we view it as a stepping stone, and that's the idea of these presentations is we have certain capabilities now, the capability which is focused on making sure that information is shared between organizations in a very fluid way. There is also — and where we're hoping that FIDEX can evolve to, a FIDEX 2.0, if you will — is to start looking at managing some of that information where forensic examination becomes a portion of that, but you start looking at integrating information in from multiple other data sources.

So, to that end, when we started looking at it technically, from a technical perspective, how we wanted to design the tool, what functionality and capabilities we wanted it to have, one of the baseline requirements that we identified is we had to have multiple configurations. Every agency is in a different place, frankly, from a technical capability standpoint.

You have some organizations where you have 10 police officers and five of those might be part time, and we wanted FIDEX to be accessible to them as well as the major metropolitan police area. So we designed it with multiple configurations in mind.

In its simplest format, it's a web-based application with a database, that anyone that has access to that server and access to that particular case can receive information, all the way to the point where we implemented it with Boston Police Department, where it's actually, once you enter that incident number, it's going out, it's grabbing that information from the evidence management system. It's grabbing that information from a records management system or a booking system and creating these links electronically and everywhere in between.

And then, as I mentioned earlier, we also wanted to make sure that this did not compel any particular work flow. When we take a look from a data exchange standpoint at the kind of information that agencies wanted to collect, there's a lot of consistency between agencies. There were wide variations in terms of the specific work flows. We wanted to make this thing work flow agnostic, if you will. And we also wanted to build an open system. So, if you have developers, if you have those internal IT resources that are capable of expanding and extending the functionality of the tool, they're able to.

So what I would like to do — and this is always a mildly risky proposition — is actually give you an online demonstration of the FIDEX tool based on one particular scenario of usage.

So the concept here is kind of to follow BPD's, Boston Police Department's, way of processing a case, which essentially starts off with a detective or the crime scene team enters information to the evidence tracking tool and then the detective may or may not take a look at that and fill out a long form by hand and say, “For this piece of evidence, I'd like these examinations,” and so on and so forth.

Now, the way that we ended up adjusting that business process is we still assumed that the crime scene team or the detective is going to enter information into their evidence tracker tool. It's a legacy tool set, and what we want to do is actually import information. So what they do is they enter an incident number, hit query, and what the tool does at this point is it goes out to all interconnected systems, says, “Here's my incident number, give me any and all information that you have about this particular case.”

Now, in full disclosure, I'm running this off of my laptop, no Internet or anything like that. So I'm actually pulling information just from my laptop, but the way we have BPD configured is to go out to these various systems.

So once a detective opens up or anyone else involved in the case opens up, they can see five or six tabs across the top of the screen. One of the very fundamental requirements, quite frankly, that Sergeant Markey and other police officers drilled into me is this thing has to be simple. You've got to make it simple to interface with. You do not want to overwhelm people with information. So we created … we identified the six kind of areas of information that seemed to be the most relevant, such as the request, the date and time of the incident, some basic incident location information, basic information about the offense, including offense code, and if we had a court case management system integrated into this and it had gone to that point of actually initiating a court case, we can pull in the docket number and the current status of the court case.

But, probably, the most important tab is the second one, the evidence tab, which is pulled in from that evidence tracking system, and one of the things — and Kevin touched on this briefly — one of the things the tool does is every night at about one o'clock in the morning, it goes out, asks the evidence tracking system, “Do you have any additional evidence associated with this case?” and it's going to do that on all active cases. And if it does, it adds it to this list and, maybe even more importantly, notifies anyone associated with the case that that additional evidence has been added.

So, again, taking on the role of an investigator, I've got these 11 pieces of evidence and let's say I want to add an examination, and I'm going to add it to items number two and three, and I'm going to request that the lab compare the casings to the projectiles. The discipline requested is firearms, and the service requested is … we'll just pick this one. These dropdown lists are configurable. So whatever your lab has for these different areas, discipline and services, you can certainly standardize on those and add the examination. So now the detective and anyone else associated with the case can go into the tool and see all of the examinations that have been requested on any particular piece of evidence.

Now, the BPD, as it is with Phoenix Police Department, one of the next steps is, again, they've got to include that long form with the physical evidence, and because we have all of the information that we need for that long form, what we did is we re-created that submission form so that they could electronically generate that straight from the tool.

Now, generating this form does a couple of things and potentially three things. Number one, the detective would take this long form, print it out and attach it to the physical evidence when they're transferring it over to the property and evidence room of the crime lab. They still want that piece of paper.

The second thing it does is it notifies a supervisor in the crime lab that additional evidence is coming your way, giving them kind of a heads-up. And if we had this hooked into a Laboratory Information Management System, what it would also do is essentially pre-populate that management system. All the information has already entered about the evidence. All the examination requests are there, and the idea is to avoid this need for redundant data entry where your front office clerks accept the evidence, have to re-key in all that same exact kind of information.

Then from there, the idea is that the supervisor assigns a criminalist who takes over the examination. Assigning it is pretty straightforward. We pre-populate a list of people that have been assigned to it. Now Claudia has been assigned to this thing, and now she has authority to see the case. She also will receive all e-mail notifications associated with that case.

The other tabs accumulate information from other external systems. For example, the suspect in this case, Gregory Knight, was booked in on this case, and we actually grabbed this information in from the booking system, including the booking number.

Case parties is where you start managing who receives notification. So if you assign an analyst, they're automatically added as an interested party for this case, but you can also add any other number of people, whether it be detectives, whether it … it might include supervisors and so on and so forth. You can add other people and assign a role to these folks to make sure that they receive these automated notifications.

Then, finally, we also talked about needing to know about these court hearings that are coming up. So, if you're interfacing with a court case management system and they're associating or you have a way of linking it to the incident number, which most case management systems do, you can start receiving electronic feeds of upcoming court dates for this particular case. And, again, it actually has a piece of functionality in there, configurable, that if you've got open examinations and you've got an upcoming court event within a week, it will send everyone who's interested in that notification out an alert to say, “Hey, you've got something going on here. You may need to either continue the case or maybe the data has been updated or whatever,” but it just gives everyone a little bit of heads-up using existing systems, using your existing e-mail networks that you already have.

Now, one of the functionalities that, quite frankly, we almost discovered by accident by talking with Boston Police Department is this need for statistical information. Even agencies that have fairly robust and sophisticated evidence tracking systems, they seem to be kind of short. These systems don't seem to be shipped with great reporting mechanisms, but we've got a lot of that information in the FIDEX tool.

So a supervisor or anyone given the authority to can click on things and view in real time what is your current backlog, what kind of cases are being requested. This information has actually been accumulated primarily from Phoenix Police Department, and so you can see for the last six months, IAFIS requests constitute about 50 percent of their examination requests, which seems about right.

You can also start looking at it from a managerial standpoint — where are my backlogs, what examinations have been submitted to particular analysts and what is that status of this. And we ended up removing the full name of the analyst, but you can see they can see what examinations are currently open based on who it's been assigned to, and even the color indicates the kind of examination that has been requested of that person.

And I will tell you when we ended up showing this chart to a crime lab director, they were surprised by the result. They had no idea that these kind of examinations were open, and so they found it extremely valuable.

And then the last one I want to talk about is very much … it's going to take a little bit. It's doing a lot of work behind the scenes. It's very much a theoretical analysis. What we wanted to do is take a look at if we can get a list of all the evidence that is currently, quote/unquote, “in the property room,” which assumes that it's been put into the evidence tracking system, and compare it to examinations that have been made against that evidence, can we take a look and identify situations where you have biological evidence that have no corresponding examinations on it, which is, as you know, one of the big issues.

And what we ended up finding, using a subset of data, is that there are 29 cases where it seems like evidence had been collected, a rape kit had been collected, but no examination had been performed on this thing.

Now, this, as with a lot of these kind of tools, it ends up giving you hints. It gives you an area to look at for potential follow-up, and, in fact, we did end up following up on these, and, in most cases, it was a data entry issue. It was examinations were outsourced to an external crime lab, and the results of that aren't put back into the one location that we're pulling information from.

But the idea of the notion is that we might even be able to start identifying pieces of evidence that had been overlooked for whatever reason, whether it's because the victim wasn't willing to testify or the technology wasn't there, because this is the case that's 25 years old.