Support Grows for a Regional Crime Laboratory : Drugs: With the rise in arrests, candidates for sheriff join the call for a facility to serve all county law enforcement agencies.

An influential group of local government and law-enforcement officials is pushing for a new regional crime laboratory to handle growing crime in San Diego County, particularly in North County, where some frustrated investigators say that long delays in evidence examinations have jeopardized narcotics cases.

The concept of a regional crime lab is supported by all four major candidates for county sheriff. San Diego City Councilman Ron Roberts and San Diego police officials also are concerned that taxpayer money is wasted on the duplication of equipment and manpower under the existing system of separate city and county crime labs.

The officials also believe that, by joining forces, city and county crime analysts could better handle the dramatically rising number of requests for fingerprints, firearm tests and other scientific exams needed to process crucial court evidence.

In North County, in particular, the increasing number of drug arrests has left some small city police detectives at wits end when the overworked county sheriff’s crime lab cannot complete narcotics evaluations in a timely manner.

“Back in 1980, we were making maybe 4, 5 or 6 drug arrests a month,” said Oceanside Police Lt. John Bart. “Now we’re making that many per shift.”

And, although he believes evidence technicians are doing their best to keep up with the demands, he added:

“I know in my heart of hearts that we’re losing felony cases because the results aren’t coming through on time. We’re just really frustrated. As a manager, I understand what happens when the workload gets so crazy that you can’t keep up.”

Looking for ways to save money, Roberts earlier this month sent letters to the sheriff’s candidates, asking for their position on a city-county crime lab. He said outgoing Sheriff John Duffy has in the past “had some concerns” against a regional lab, and the councilman hopes Duffy’s successor will be more agreeable to combining efforts with the city Police Department.

Surprisingly, all four major candidates who responded to Roberts’ query announced support for his proposal.

“Now, once one of these gentlemen is sheriff, I see no reason why we can’t immediately begin discussions to get this thing going,” Roberts said Tuesday.

Jack Drown, an assistant sheriff and candidate for the job of his boss, said the county now spends about $1.2 million for lab operations at its site near the Sports Arena. He and other county officials concede that the sheriff’s crime lab is overworked and that there often is a backlog of cases with long delays before exams are completed. “We need some sort of a (politically) turfless lab,” he said. “Not necessarily a sheriff’s lab or a Police Department lab or a city lab or a county lab. But one that I suspect is a truly regional lab where no one agency controls it.”

Drown denied that Duffy was strongly opposed to a joint lab. In the past, he said, the sheriff has simply “never really seen the need for it.”

Cmdr. Larry Gore, a spokesman for the city Police Department, said his agency is concerned that “a great deal” of similar equipment, expertise and manpower is needlessly purchased and expended by both the city and county labs.

“What we have are two major labs in our county,” he said. “And I suspect that, if you really studied it at length, there are certain areas where we duplicate our efforts.”

James Miller, manager of the city crime lab at police headquarters, said his annual budget is about $2.8 million, and “that includes salaries, overtime, equipment, and pencils and notebooks.”

But he said the greatest cost is in personnel, not equipment, and that, even if the two efforts were combined, the countywide demand would remain the same and there would be no real cost savings at first.

“We have four, full-time staff members who do narcotics analyses,” he said. “We have four, and we keep them busy full time. If we merged with the sheriff, we’d need our four and their three or four to keep up with the combined load.

“You wouldn’t wind up saving anything at all. There would be some savings in equipment, but not any gigantic savings, like in the millions.”

Vince Jimno, another candidate for sheriff and police chief of Escondido who is on leave, held a press conference Tuesday morning to stress his support for a regional crime lab.

He suggested that a regional lab be funded through a joint-powers agreement and supervised by a lab director who reports to a commission made up of representatives from the law-enforcement agencies who use its services.

“Why continue to duplicate activities and maintain a higher cost to the taxpayers when there is a better way to do it cheaper?” he said.

Also pushing the idea were candidates Jim Roache and Ray Hoobler.

Hoobler, an ex-San Diego police chief, said that, “without question, the redundancy that occurs is extremely expensive.” And Roache, a sheriff’s captain, said in a letter to Roberts that “the unnecessary duplication of public services needlessly wastes scarce local government resources.”

A fifth candidate, Carlsbad police officer James Messenger, could not be reached for comment and did not respond to Roberts’ query.

Other North County law-enforcement officers have talked for some time about frustrations in dealing with the sheriff’s crime lab.

Bart, the Oceanside lieutenant, said that during one recent week, three misdemeanor drug charges were not pursued because the lab was unable to do the testing in time.

Victor Ramirez, a North County municipal judge, said he has seen about a third of the criminal cases involving drugs postponed at the preliminary hearing stage because of delays in chemical analyses--sometimes because the lab was tardy, but also because police officers simply forgot to drive first to San Diego to pick up the drugs and the lab test results.

Escondido Police Lt. John Wilson said that, when his officers anticipate a backlog at the crime lab, some of his specially trained investigators conduct their own in-house drug analyses and that, depending on the investigators’ reputations in court, their findings are found acceptable until the crime lab can conduct its own tests.

Carlsbad Police Chief Bob Vales said he’s heard his rank-and-file officers grumble about the crime lab backlog, but he says the problem is even larger, something a regional lab might not be able to fix.

“It’s with the district attorney’s office, the courts, the jails and the probation department,” he said.