Case of the empty regional crime lab is no mystery

Faced with huge backlogs in unprocessed DNA and other types of criminal evidence, Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca and LAPD Chief William J. Bratton had long been looking forward to Friday’s ribbon-cutting for the new joint-agency regional crime lab.

Unfortunately, the grand opening was only for show. The building remains empty.

Construction delays put the gleaming five-story building nine months behind schedule, so the hundreds of criminalists who examine firearms, blood, hair and narcotics from crime scenes will have to keep working in cramped quarters for now.

Many may not move into the new building until July.

Billed as the largest municipal crime lab in the nation, the Los Angeles Regional Crime Lab on the Cal State L.A. campus was delayed for years by squabbles between the two agencies and will eventually come in with a super-size price tag of $102 million -- about $11.5 million more than first estimated. All but about $6 million of the total will be borne by the state.

City leaders are frustrated that the delays postponed evidence processing and slowed the pursuit of justice.

“The delays kill me because we’re talking about real violent criminals remaining on the streets because cases have not been solved scientifically,” said Councilman Jack Weiss, a former prosecutor who has been a vocal proponent of expanding crime analysis operations.

Los Angeles Police Department crime lab workers now toil in tight quarters that force them to share desks and work space over three shifts. The main lab at Piper Technical Center downtown -- where employees perform scientific analysis in windowless rooms -- was built to house 30 criminalists, but the department has 140. Some have been shipped to temporary offices in the department’s Northeast Division and Parker Center headquarters.

The technicians process 30,000 cases a year.

But 370 DNA cases submitted by detectives are backlogged because technicians have room to process only 18 cases a week. There is also a backlog of 6,000 rape kits that contain DNA evidence from sexual assaults but that have not been submitted by detectives for analysis. The backlog of bullets and casings waiting to be matched to firearms: 2,000. The number that current lab workers can process each week: about 60.

Sheriff’s Department technicians, meanwhile, have been spread among antiquated facilities on Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles and labs in Downey and Lancaster.

Because finishing the regional lab on time could have speeded up the processing of evidence in hundreds of criminal cases, the lab should have been put on a fast track, said Jon Coupal, head of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn.

“In the hierarchy of government services, public safety is No. 1, so this should have been moved to the top of the priority list,” he said.

Others say building delays were inevitable on such a complicated project.

“Every construction project that ever existed hasn’t come off as expected,” said Greg Matheson, director of the city crime lab.

Added project coordinator Patrick Mallon: “The building is extremely complex because of the mechanical systems that support the lab functions.”

The joint crime lab was proposed a decade ago by the Los Angeles County Grand Jury, which identified the shortcomings of existing labs and concluded that a consolidated agency would save $3.3 million annually in personnel and equipment costs, in addition to operating “more efficiently, effectively and economically.”

But deciding how the building would be shared took years.

Baca, who said the lab has been a priority since he took office in 1998, was involved in much of the planning. He rejected an initial architectural rendering of the building’s exterior and approved modifications that he said ensures “this building will look important.”

“This is an unprecedented regional lab,” the sheriff said this week. “It has to be done the right way.”

In 2001, The Times reported that law enforcement officials estimated the building would open in 2005. But disagreements emerged over how much the LAPD and the Sheriff’s Department should share personnel, equipment and space.

A joint-powers agreement, which spelled out the responsibilities of the agencies, was scheduled to be approved in January 2001 but was not passed by the City Council and the Board of Supervisors until that August.

The two sides agreed to share just 25% of the space, with most of their operations remaining separate.

By 2003, various other disagreements pushed the opening back to 2006.

Then a plan to open in September 2006 ran into more problems: The winning bid from S.J. Amoroso Construction Co. came in $8 million higher than expected, Mallon said. Still more troubles pushed the move-in date from September to February and now to June or July.

LAPD and sheriff’s officials are just glad that the new facility is nearly ready.

The 209,080-square-foot building includes separate lab space for 335 city and county criminalists. There is also space for the university’s criminal justice program and the California Forensic Science Institute, which provides in-service training.

The crime lab’s formal name is the Hertzberg/Davis Forensic Science Center after former Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg and former Gov. Gray Davis, two Democrats who were key players in arranging the state funding.

In arguing for the large state role, backers noted that approximately 40% of the crime in California occurs in Los Angeles County.

Bratton said any differences before he became chief in 2002 have been replaced by a spirit of close cooperation between the LAPD and Sheriff’s Department.

“You really cannot overstate how significant this is,” he said of the crime lab. “It allows for a very significant expansion of personnel to focus particularly on the growing area of DNA analysis. It provides us with space to expand into. It will certainly help with crime-fighting, giving detectives a much more expedited turnaround on ballistics information and on DNA.”

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patrick.mcgreevy@latimes.com

stuart.pfeifer@latimes.com