Crime isn't an issue that the Wizard often writes about. Despite the fact that criminal activity is something that is pervasive in all societies and a fact of life that nobody can ever get around, it wasn't something that interested me too much. Maybe it was because I grew up in a fairly safe middle to upper-middle class neighborhood that made me not dwell on the topic very much, or perhaps it was my generally optimistic view on life that made me not think about crime, but I digress.
Maybe it was reading the story about Richardo Richell that scared the daylights out of me, or maybe it was reading that Conroe police officer Michael Tindall has been accused of robbing a bank for a petty $28,000, an amount that may well not be enough to cover his attorney's fees for defending him. Or maybe it was reading that there are bookshelves full of case studies that have been done that indicate that eyewitness identification of those accused are often shown to be mistaken that set me to writing about the need for a regional criminal lab.
City Councilwoman Jolanda Jones wrote an editorial recently discussing the matter of a regional crime lab. Ms. Jones makes a good point about the issue of Houston police running their own crime lab and then trying to present its results in trial against defendants. Houston's problems are not unique, as this link and all these stories from searching for the term "crime labs" suggest. But the issue may well go further than simply creating a regional crime lab. It has to do with the idea that such a lab would be funded by the law enforcement agencies of the region that would be the - how shall one say - customers of such an institution. One reasonable question to ask is that who would be making the decisions on hiring and qualifications for staffing such an institution? It would seem to me that it would be... the government!
It seems to me that there are two things that need to be added to enable a regional crime lab to be more effective at doing its job. First is that such a lab would need to have enough money in its budgets to hold onto accredited and qualified personnel and clear its case loads in a timely manner, and second it would seem that the criminal defense bars of the region need to have someone on site to verify procedures and lab results from the crime lab. After all, that was the very problem that Ms. Jones and others discovered with the Houston police department crime lab to begin with. Perhaps all who are accused, whether they are accused of a simple traffic violation or of something much worse, could be assessed, as part of their bail, a non-refundable token sum of money that would go towards funding the regional crime lab, and could also go towards funding defense bar inspection and oversight of such a lab. Not doing so could open the door to merely transferring the problems of shoddy lab conditions, poor management of samples, not to mention sloppy handling of evidence, from a Houston police department run lab to the new regional lab. That is simply unacceptable.
Wizard