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The reduction in overtime expenses for fingerprint specialists has delayed the collection of evidence in crimes such as burglaries by as much as a week or more. Victims are frustrated by the time lag.
Budget cuts ordered by Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca have undermined his agency’s ability to collect and analyze fingerprint evidence, causing delays for more than 65 homicide investigations and resulting in the destruction of potential leads in scores of other crimes. Baca cut overtime expenses for 59 fingerprint specialists in an effort to help make a $128-million budget cut. The move has delayed the collection of evidence in crimes such as burglaries by as much as a week or more.
Some burglary victims have had to stay away from parts of their homes or temporarily close their businesses to avoid smudging prints and destroying potentially vital evidence. For others, the delayed response has been too much of a burden. Sheriff’s officials estimate that since the cuts went into effect in March, 10% of burglary victims have simply cleaned up and moved on with their lives because they couldn’t afford to wait.
Carla Copeland’s two-bedroom apartment in Gramercy Park was burglarized a month ago. The 39-year-old’s flat-screen TV was gone, her computer monitor was yanked out of the outlet, drawers were pulled open and closets rummaged through. She figured her home would be covered with the culprits’ fingerprints. Half a dozen other units in the complex had also been recently burglarized, and a fingerprint match would have spelled hope for getting her possessions back. Sheriff’s deputies told her forensic experts would take prints. “But they couldn’t tell me when,” Copeland recalled. “They said it was no telling.”
For days, she and her 16-year-old daughter tiptoed around the affected areas, careful to avoid sullying any prints. A week passed, followed by another, and prints were never taken. Eventually the two cleaned up, no longer able to allow their home to look like a disaster zone. Fingerprints around the home have almost certainly been destroyed, Copeland said.
Before the cuts, crime lab employees were working about 600 hours of overtime a week to collect and analyze fingerprints, among other duties. That number has been cut to less than 100 hours. The good news, sheriff’s officials say, is that the department is on track to meet its goal of reducing the budget by $128 million before the next fiscal year. “The bad news is some things are not being done,” sheriff’s spokesman Steve Whitmore said. “It makes it very difficult, sometimes impossible, whenever you can’t collect evidence.”
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Categories: Forensics
Tags: Budget Cuts, California, Crime Labs, Crime Scene, Evidence, Finger Printing, Forensics, Identification, Los Angeles, Police