O.C. Crime Lab Detects Decline : Law enforcement: The renowned facility’s daunting backlog grows as budget cuts become criminal’s accomplice.

The tidy, brown paper sacks rarely give hint to their gruesome contents. A tattered dress and nylons. A bloodied nightgown. Soiled chunks of carpet.

The items are the remnants of unsolved Orange County sexual assaults and, in the cool and quiet of evidence freezers in police stations countywide, they wait, perhaps holding the clues that could identify the attackers. A hair or fiber, a speck of body fluid with telltale DNA.

But in many cases no one is looking. There is no time, there is no money, officials say.

While the besieged Los Angeles Police Department crime lab wrestles with far larger caseloads and humiliating charges of shoddy work leveled during the O.J. Simpson murder trial, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department crime lab has enjoyed years of glowing reviews and state-of-the-art facilities. But now, sheriff’s officials concede, they may be losing their edge.

Faced with staff cuts and mounting backlogs, frustrated criminalists at the lab have reluctantly changed the way they do business. Cases with trial dates and known suspects must take priority, so the lab’s staff has curtailed what might be called its “enterprise investigations,” the hunt for clues in cases where detectives have no suspects and few leads.

The cases most often delayed or abandoned are the time-consuming analysis of biological evidence from sex crimes with no known suspect and property theft cases, said Frank Fitzpatrick, director of the sheriff’s crime lab in Santa Ana.

“It comes down to this: Burglars are left on the street longer and sexual predators are left on the street longer because we can’t do all the things we’re capable of,” Fitzpatrick said. “And that is hard to accept.”

The lab, which does scientific detective work for every Orange County law enforcement agency, no longer routinely conducts tests on biological or trace evidence taken from the scenes of sexual assaults unless police have a specific attacker to match the evidence against.

Without that DNA work, there is no way to check those unsolved cases against the statewide database that logs the genetic “fingerprints” of sex criminals. The database is still small, but there is a chance it could link a suspect to an unsolved rape or assault with a few keystrokes.

The evidence in cold-lead cases is also not analyzed to see whether it matches other crimes, Fitzpatrick said. Establishing those connections could prove invaluable to law enforcement agencies who might be unknowingly pursuing the same criminal. Detectives who may have different pieces of the same puzzle might never know.

Investigators say the only exceptions to these policies are especially heinous or high-profile crimes, such as the rape last weekend of a 9-year-old girl at a wooded park in Lake Forest. Work had already begun analyzing that evidence by midweek. Prioritizing tragic events presents sizable moral quandaries, sheriff’s officials say, but the demands of budgets, the public and courtroom deadlines call for nothing less.

“In a case that is especially offensive to us all as a society, we are going to go the extra mile and we are going to do everything we can,” said sheriff’s spokesman Lt. Ron Wilkerson. “That doesn’t lessen the severity or cruelty or importance of other crimes. It’s very difficult with issues like this. If you have another victim who is equally traumatized--how do you explain the choices?”

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The hard choices have been forced by the budgetary bottom line, sheriff’s officials said.

Although the Sheriff’s Department weathered the aftermath of Orange County’s bankruptcy last December far better than many other county agencies--its $9 million in cuts pales in comparison to the $19-million hit suffered by the Social Services Agency--law enforcement officials say the losses have hurt.

Sheriff Brad Gates spread the cuts “surgically” throughout his 2,400-employee department, Fitzpatrick said, and the lab was not spared.

The lab budget is now $8.1 million, about $400,000 less than last year. The lab had 118 staff positions last year, but is down to about 100 employees today. Five more employees are expected to quit soon seeking better jobs, and the recruitment and training of their replacements might take six months. The backlogs, Fitzpatrick said, will only grow worse.

The cases facing the greatest delays have been crimes against property, which, along with drug analysis and blood-alcohol work, make up the lion’s share of the lab’s vast workload.

Evidence from burglaries sits for months before it is examined, giving the thief time to escape, sell the stolen goods or commit other crimes, Fitzpatrick said. Checking latent fingerprints against those on file in the statewide CAL ID fingerprint database also must be postponed for weeks or months, he said. Because CAL ID routinely returns a match on 20% of the prints checked, that lag time might cost police their best shot at a quick case resolution.

“These are our bread-and-butter cases,” Fitzpatrick said. “If the system was working correctly, we collect these prints, run them through the computer the same day, and in one out of five cases we could have a name the next morning by the time the detective gets to the office. They can go out and find this person, maybe in possession of stolen property.

“We could have the case solved or well on the way to being solved.”

Indeed, detectives across the county said lab work can provide them with a slam-dunk solution to cases or a binding web of evidence that almost assures convictions. But delays can compromise some of that effectiveness, and abandoned procedures might allow criminals to slip through the cracks.

“When you look at it overall, absent a confession, our best bet a lot of time is building a case with some of the answers we get from the lab,” said Sgt. Greg Mays, a Fullerton police investigator. “It can be invaluable. It can provide leads in otherwise leadless cases.”

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Right now, there is a six- to nine-month backlog on processing fingerprints for burglaries and auto thefts, the worst the lab has ever seen. “Some we may never get to,” Fitzpatrick said of the more than 300 Manila envelopes containing waiting cases.

As one longtime lab employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity put it: “We’re doing nothing but playing fireman. We’re putting out fires, running to handle the big case of the day while the backlogs get worse and worse.”

The delays has been cause for concern in among detectives in the 24 local agencies who rely on the county lab for varying degrees of support. Some larger cities have small, in-house labs that handle some forensics work, but all turn to the sheriff’s lab for help with homicides, DNA work and most ballistics investigations. Even Huntington Beach police, which houses the only other major crime lab in the county, turns to the sheriff’s operation for assistance with big cases.

No department uses the crime lab more than the Santa Ana police, the source of most firearms cases that go through the sheriff’s facility. Grappling with gang problems and confiscating about 50 guns a month, the city’s police officials say they know well the impact of lab backlogs.

“We have hundreds of cases here, literally hundreds of guns we haven’t even sent over because we know they’ll just sit in a pile there,” Santa Ana Police Lt. Hugh Mooney said. “We know what they’re dealing with, so we have to pick and choose what we send.”

The lab puts a priority on cases where a trial is pending, but Mooney said that can present a problem for street investigators. Often, detectives cannot piece together a strong case without the connections between suspects and crimes and guns that can be forged through ballistics work.

“Sometimes we can’t get firearms comparison until we get a trial date, but we can’t get a case ready for trial until we get firearms comparison work done,” Mooney said. “It’s a Catch-22 for us.”

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The backlogs also can draw out an investigation to the point of breaking, Mooney said. Witnesses forget events or disappear as the months go by, and detectives find themselves turning to fresher, more pressing cases.

“But the guys over in the lab are the best there is, I want to stress that,” Mooney said. “But there’s just no staffing. They can only do so much.”

Some concerns about the lab’s effectiveness may be magnified by the standards the criminalists have set for it in the past. Unlike its far more famous counterpart in the LAPD, the Orange County lab is nationally accredited and has enjoyed a reputation as a flagship facility. In the 1980s, it became the site of the first major DNA crime lab on the West Coast and it began this decade by moving into a three-floor facility that is the envy of many criminalists throughout the region.

“The new Seventh Wonder of the World,” joked Michele Kestler, director of the LAPD lab, when asked about the sheriff’s lab. Kestler’s facility, lambasted by defense attorneys during the Simpson murder trial, wrestles with a caseload many times greater than Orange County’s but a staff just over twice the size, she said.

How much larger is the LAPD lab’s caseload? Hard to say, Kestler answers, because “believe it or not” her lab has no automated case tracking system. But she knows that more than 800 homicides a year are handled in her building, with its leaky roofs and cramped quarters--about four times more than the number that passes through Orange County’s lab in its glass and steel high-rise next to the Civic Center in Santa Ana.

But Kestler still sympathizes with her Orange County colleagues. For all their advantages, she said, they now face budget cuts that will stymie their efforts to keep pace with both their workload and the field’s quickly changing technologies.

“They were lucky enough to get this gigantic facility and nice new equipment before it all hit, but now this is marching them backward,” she said. “The old ‘back up 10 yards and punt.’ They can’t make headway. The longer it lasts the worse off you are.”

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One area where officials fear losing headway is the lab’s use of the California Department of Justice’s year-old DNA database for tracking sexual criminals.

The database already has the genetic “fingerprint” of 4,000 sex offenders, and information on 30,000 more will be entered next year, according to Jan Bashinski, forensic services bureau chief for the state Department of Justice. The new tool is a source of great excitement to criminalists because sex offenders often are repeat criminals, so tracking offenders and linking crimes could pay huge dividends to law enforcement.

But time constraints have forced the Orange County lab to abandon its plan to run genetic evidence from every sexual assault through the database. That eliminates the chance of tying a unsolved crime to an offender.

More than that, reducing the number of entries now will limit the database’s effectiveness in the future, Bashinski said. When a match is not found, for example, the database logs the unrecognized DNA information and then compares it to all new entries, both of known criminals and other unsolved crimes.

Mooney, a 21-year veteran of the Santa Ana force, said preemptive tests on DNA from sexual assaults--such as running evidence through the database or routinely comparing genetic markers from different crimes to one another--can help police nab sex offenders who consciously alter their pattern to evade capture.

“The serial rapists who use different M.O.s or commit crimes in different locations, those crimes might never get linked by us,” Mooney said. “I can’t say how critical information like that can be to us. But the lab has limitations, I know, on what it can do.”

Walking through the pristine, white laboratories, Fitzpatrick rattled off other examples of the facility’s limitations. In the ballistics lab, he noted the spot where the staff’s favorite firearms microscope system once stood. The three-foot-tall, custom-made device from Germany was the lab’s “Cadillac of microscopes” before it was repossessed in January.

Nearby, in another lab, a scientist was filing away on new parts to make them fit an antiquated breath-alcohol testing machine that was scheduled to be replaced two years ago, but now will have to last another few months. A wall chart notes that five of the 25 breath-alcohol machines the lab supplies to police agencies are broken.

In Room 749, a walk-in freezer, Fitzpatrick hefted a bin full of carefully labeled envelopes and packages, all containing some remnant of the violence and mayhem that play out every day across Orange County. This is the backlog up close, the evidence awaiting examination. The bins are always full.

Five hundred drug cases await processing, 230 toxicology reports, 320 sets of fingerprints, 170 firearms that need to be examined, and 60 gunshot residue cases. And new business comes in every day.

“But it’s going to get better,” Fitzpatrick said. “The sheriff is committed to us having a high-quality, modern lab. That has always been clear to us. I know it will get better. But we just don’t want to dig ourselves into a hole we can’t get out of.”

* TRIAL FALLOUT: Simpson case made criminalists’ job even harder. A39

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Crime Labs Compared

Both of Orange County’s major crime labs have been forced to curtail some investigative efforts because of budget and staffing cuts. Here’s a comparison of the two labs and their counterpart facility at the Los Angeles Police Department:

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Orange County Huntington Beach Sheriff Police Square feet 90,000 5,000 Annual budget (millions) $8.1 $1.3 Staff 100 14 Annual homicide caseload 200 4 Annual drug analysis caseload 12,000 2,100 DNA testing capability? Yes No

Los Angeles Police Square feet 35,000 Annual budget (millions) $12* Staff 225 Annual homicide caseload 800 Annual drug analysis caseload 19,100 DNA testing capability? Limited

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* Estimate based on budget survey. Lab budget not listed as a separate segment of total department’s budget; it is instead funded by many line-item allocations.

Sources: Orange County Sheriff’s Department, Huntington Beach and Los Angeles Police Departments; Researched by GEOFF BOUCHER / Los Angeles Times