Independence

Police use forensics in all sorts of cases, from driving while intoxicated cases, drug possession cases, to homicide investigations and police shootings.  From the first moments that an investigation has started by a detective or police officer, a crime scene investigator, or CSI, may get involved. The CSI “is in place to assist with the investigation by finding, documenting, collecting and possible analyzing evidence that may place a suspect of victim at a scene.”   Many people think that such crime scene investigators, and then their colleagues in a crime lab, do highly scientific and high-tech work.  Many have discussed “the CSI Effect” of television shows such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and Law & Order. Far from expecting that every case involves DNA or science, instead, most laypeople believe that forensic evidence is 100% accurate.  People do not realize how readily forensics can go wrong, including because most of the CSI and lab professionals are actually acting as law enforcement, and not independent scientists.

There is greater understanding today that policing can be biased, including racially biased, in ways that disproportionately burden minorities with criminal legal involvement.  Forensic science plays an under-appreciated role in that system.  In forensic science, testing is rarely blind.  Traditionally, the forensic examiner talks to the police, and hear all sorts of biasing information about the suspect, like the person’s race and criminal record.  Forensic experts are also biased by the side that they work for.  Experts who see themselves as part of the police and prosecution team predictably shade their results to help the prosecution.

This has been a high-profile problem in investigations of police use of deadly force.  There is evidence that large numbers of deaths — more than half of police killings in the United States — have been mislabeled and not counted as police violence-related deaths, due to medical examiner’s conclusions in death certificates.  As the New York Times noted, “forensic pathologists regularly consult with detectives and prosecutors and in some jurisdictions they are directly employed by police agencies.”  For example, the coroner called Ronald Greene’s death in Louisiana as an accidental and the result of a heart attack, before a video was released showing Greene stunned, beaten and dragged by state troopers.

We need independent scientific crime labs and not police crime labs.  The National Academy of Sciences report warned that a “lack of independence” in crime labs can damage the objectivity of forensic science. Yet very few labs in the United States are independent.  The first crime labs in the United States were created by police agencies and housed in police departments.  That is mostly still the case.  A survey of about 300 labs conducted in the 1980s, found that 79% were located within law enforcement or public safety agencies and most would only examine evidence submitted by law enforcement officials.  As one leading scholar has explained, “the police agency controls the formal and informal system of rewards and sanctions for the laboratory examiners.”

Today, there are over four hundred publicly funded crime labs. The budgets of publicly funded labs have certainly grown. In 2014 they totaled $1.7 billion. There are more labs that are independent, but not many more.  In a handful of states, there is some amount of independence to a lab’s budget and organizational structure.  They still largely conduct testing requested by law enforcement, and return results back to law enforcement.  Their budgets are still largely law enforcement-directed.  Indeed, in some states, any criminal defendant is charged a fixed crime lab fee. We should not be funding forensic evidence with an incentive to convict and draw funds from people charged with crimes.