Of all the changes I’ve seen in 50 years in law enforcement and fingerprints, the most disheartening is the migration from “thorough and complete” to “one and done,” or even worse, “hit and quit.”
At the police agencies where I worked in the 1970s through the mid-1990s, the mantra was “thorough and complete.” We were expected to compare every latent to every suspect and even do victim elimination comparisons. We verified identifications, but we seldom bothered with exclusions and nobody second-guessed our decisions on initial suitability for comparison.
I can understand the tightening up of best practices to include verification of suitability determinations and the requirement to exclude when we can’t identify. What I cannot understand is why those are best practices, but the need to compare all the latents in a case is NOT a best practice.
So, “one and done” We make one identification and terminate the examination. That denies the court a sizeable amount of the evidence in a case.
And now, an increasing number of latent print AFIS sections are practicing “hit and quit.” In other words, one AFIS hit ends the examination, no matter how many latents are left in the case.
Even more alarming is the fact that some agencies do not even verify the AFIS hit before reporting it as “an investigative lead.” In other words, AFIS yields a “hit” on one latent and a report is generated to the investigator without the print actually being identified and verified. There is usually the admonition to the investigator that the hit is only meant as a lead and does not constitute probable cause for an arrest. Nonetheless, I have heard reports of investigators jumping the gun and using an AFIS “investigative lead” hit report as probable cause for an arrest warrant.
I know the excuses. We don’t have the manpower. We can only do a fraction of our cases as is without worrying about being “thorough and complete.” And backtracking to the source of the problem, I am led to conclude that every time there is another tax cut, there must be a corresponding cut in services somewhere. So the number of latent print examiners doesn’t keep up with the population growth and crime rate. Nor do salaries keep up with inflation. My former supervisor, @Deborah Smith, and I agonized over the problems in our old lab before we quit.
So while the OSAC is pushing us toward “best practices” in forensic science, we have given up on being thorough and complete as the number of latent print examiners becomes inadequate for the task. Backlog spirals out of control, vast numbers of latent prints sit unexamined, and I daresay that criminals go unidentified and victims go without the satisfaction of justice.
I know the answer. Increase funding for the crime lab, pay competitive salaries for degreed scientists, and hire sufficient personnel to do the job the way it should be done. But we also work in the tenuous environment of being civilians in pseudo-military organizations. Too often, new funding goes first to the sworn side of the house, and new cuts are made first to the civilian side of the house. So the answer that I believe would solve the problem is itself highly improbable.
But I do know this: As a #defenseexpert, I would be looking at the department policies that prevent thorough and complete examinations of evidence and urging the attorney to stir reasonable doubt from the abundance of unexamined evidence. After all, if we’re going to put a person in prison and proclaim justice for the victim of a crime, shouldn’t we do at least that much?
Perhaps, if prosecutors start losing cases because of one and done or hit and quit, funding will be returned to crime labs.