Oakland Police Dept. dusting dilemma
Fingerprint unit has been closed for 7 months due to lack of funds and staff
By Phillip Matier, Andrew Ross
San Francisco Chronicle
December 11, 2006
Stunning as it may sound, Oakland's Police Department -- which handles some of the toughest crimes in the Bay Area -- doesn't have anyone who can read or match fingerprints.
The fingerprint unit at the department's crime lab used to consist of three technicians. But for the past seven months, it's been shut down for lack of money and staff.
Oakland cops still dust for fingerprints at a rate of about 113 cases a month. However, according to veteran homicide Sgt. Phil Green, cops often don't even bother to submit the prints for analysis because they know it's useless to do so.
"It's a huge deal,'' said Green, whose unit has been trying to deal with 142 homicides this year alone.
The prints that investigators do submit join a backlog of cases awaiting outside analysis. That backlog now totals 162 cases.
"If the question is whether we will be able to address all these cases in a timely manner, the answer is 'no,' '' said crime lab chief Mary Gibbons.
So far, prints from only about 30 Oakland cases given high priority -- homicides, rapes and the like -- have been sent out and analyzed by the Contra Costa County sheriff's crime lab in what Gibbons herself calls a Band-Aid approach.
As for prints collected from burglary scenes and other property crimes, you can pretty much forget about those being analyzed. And even more serious crimes apparently are getting the brush-off.
"This is shocking,'' said 62-year-old Nina W., who asked that we not use her last name for fear of retaliation. She learned about the fingerprint logjam after she was held up at gunpoint by three young men recently while getting into her car in the Fruitvale district.
The cops collected what evidence they could, including grainy photos from a surveillance camera of the thieves taking $40 from her account at a bank ATM.
Nina, however, couldn't identify any of the young men brought in for a lineup. When she asked investigators why they hadn't bothered dusting for fingerprints on her car door handles and elsewhere, they told her there wasn't much point because the fingerprint unit was closed. The case remains unsolved.
Gibbons said she was forced to close the unit when the last of her fingerprint experts, hired with grant money and therefore temporary, left for the security of permanent jobs elsewhere. That finally got the attention of Gibbons' bosses.
After years of trying, she got funding for two full-time fingerprint analysts in this year's budget. But filling the slots has been hard because of the city's civil service rules.
Gibbons said she doesn't expect to hire anyone until the summer, "at which point,'' she noted, "the unit will have been closed for a year.''
Deputy Police Chief Howard Jordan, head of the department's investigations bureau, said investigators don't rely just on fingerprints to nail crooks, not with DNA evidence, ballistics and other tests now in use.
But those tests can take time. For instance, the crime lab spends at least three months processing a DNA sample -- a lot longer than the "CSI" television series would lead you to believe, Gibbons points out.
And Jordan acknowledges that the basics, like fingerprint analysis, are important.
"A department this size in a city this size with the volume of work we have ought to have a fully functional latent print examiner unit so we can better investigate cases,'' Jordan said. "It would make a difference.''