Begging for Help - NOPD’s crime lab faces severe gear shortfall
by Richard A. Webster
New Orleans City Business
January 22, 2007
New Orleans Police Department Sgt. Jay Vitrano examines crime scene evidence under a microscope. The crime lab staff has been working out of a trailer in a fenced lot off Broad Street. (Photo by Frank Aymami)
There’s no silver Humvee or blue pastel mood lighting or models in white lab coats and stilettos playing cops to the soundtrack of The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again.”
There’s no space-age crime lab equipped with 23rd century technology capable of solving a case in 24 hours. There’s barely a laboratory at all.
Post-Katrina life for the members of the New Orleans Police Department crime lab is nothing like that of their counterparts on the popular CBS television series “CSI.” The depleted staff responsible for collecting and analyzing evidence works out of a trailer in a drab fenced lot off Broad Street.
They lost a permanent facility on Tulane Avenue and floodwaters destroyed more than $5 million in vital forensic equipment, which has yet to be replaced more than 17 months after the storm.
“I personally would not want to be in their shoes,” said Ronald Singer, president of the International Association of Forensic Sciences and a New Orleans native. “They are operating under quite a severe handicap and it’s a marvel they’re doing anything at all.”
To conduct a firearms test, NOPD crime lab investigators travel to St. Tammany Parish. If they want to test narcotics they go to Jefferson Parish. And to develop crime scene film, they have to drive to a lab in Baton Rouge.
The extra travel and wait time slows the investigative process while the city is under siege from murderous drug dealers and the number of open cases mount.
NOPD Capt. Tami Brisset, head of the crime lab, said its staff dropped 59 percent from 90 to 37 after the storm but the caseload has not slowed. They handled 30 cases a week immediately after the hurricane but are back to the pre-storm workload of 150 with a backlog of more than 1,500 narcotics cases now.
“The system is not working as effectively, it’s not as proficient and it’s not at maximum performance. But it’s the best we can do right now,” Brisset said. “It’s hard because we were the best when we had our own 24/7 lab but now we’re begging for help.”
The NOPD is waiting on the Federal Emergency Management Agency to approve funding for a temporary crime lab while costs are determined to build a new facility. Brisset hopes to have a temporary site by Christmas.
Until then the crime lab can’t even buy new equipment because it has no storage space, said Sgt. Becky Benelli who houses excess crime lab equipment in her Algiers home.
The Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office allows the NOPD to use its crime lab facilities for up to four hours a day to conduct tests and analyze evidence. Jefferson Parish lab director Milton Dureau said it is all they can afford to offer given the increase in Jefferson Parish homicides. There were a record 66 murders in Jefferson in 2006.
“We can only allow so much time for them to do their work because we have a ton of work ourselves,” Dureau said. “And the time we’re giving them is adversely affecting our output. It’s weighing us down.”
The new year in New Orleans kicked off with six murders in a 24-hour span, which added stress in an already overburdened crime lab. Brisset said she pulled in as many people as possible and asked them to work countless hours of overtime.
“I handled one case where there were 128 pieces of evidence, the majority of them being bullet casings,” Brisset said. “In the olden days when people had revolvers they didn’t have as much evidence but with automatic guns, when they shoot they just don’t shoot once. This isn’t Barney Fife days. When they shoot you can have a trail of casings two blocks long.”
Criminal forensics is far more tedious and time consuming than it is portrayed on television, said Brisset. Investigators spend up to eight hours photographing and collecting evidence at each crime scene. Each piece of evidence is then placed in an envelope, documented and catalogued. Before the storm, the NOPD crime lab had as many as nine investigators on each shift. Now it has five.
“When we had that 24-hour period of shootings, everybody came out and worked it,” Benelli said. “We handled one case at a time and didn’t rush but we just kept hoping we wouldn’t have too many more violent calls. But they kept coming.”
Without its own dedicated lab, the NOPD has to send DNA samples to outside agencies, which can cost up to $20,000 depending on the nature of the sample and results can take more than two months to develop. Transporting evidence to outside locations raises the risk of contamination or the loss of evidence, complications that can threaten a case, Singer said.
“The more you start to fool around with evidence, the more potential you have for something to happen to it,” Singer said. “When you start out with that as a premise, you have some issues. I would hate to have to be an orphan working at someone else’s lab because eventually your cases start to pile up. But in the case of the NOPD, they really don’t have any other choice. There’s that old saying, ‘There’s no place like home.’”