Strained Resources Hamper Police

With homicides in Los Angeles County doubling in two decades, detectives now are forced to rely on increasingly scarce physical evidence and eroded support services that can spell the difference between a criminal conviction and a killer on the loose.

In an era of killings by strangers and drive-by gang shootings, the odds are only 50-50 that anyone will be arrested for a slaying in the county. And The Times found that investigators have been stymied by other obstacles as well.

Among them:

* Coroner’s field investigators, down 30% since 1991, are spending less time working murder scenes, and county medical examiners on average perform at least three times as many homicide autopsies as their counterparts in many other counties.

* Autopsy-related reports often are backed up for months, and heavy caseloads have increased chances of error and overlooked evidence.

* Criminalists specializing in blood and trace evidence collection are rolling to fewer murder scenes--just 15%, by some official estimates.

* At the LAPD and Sheriff’s Department crime labs, hundreds of ballistics tests and other evidence analyses are backlogged at any given time--bottlenecks that not only slow investigations, but also appear to be discouraging some detectives from using the facilities.

In one LAPD case, homicide detectives said they made eight requests over seven months just to find out the caliber of bullets recovered from a homicide victim.

Nearly 2,000 people a year are slain in Los Angeles County. And more murder cases than ever are running aground for lack of evidence or ending in a muddle when tested in the courts, leaving families of victims frustrated.

“I’m never going to feel satisfied,” said 70-year-old Ellouise Pullings, whose grandson was ambushed in 1994 in the driveway of her Compton home. A suspect Pullings identified as one of the shooters was later freed in mid-trial, after a confidential police informant said he was the wrong man.

With little evidence, the case--like hundreds of others--is languishing. “I know [justice] wasn’t done,” she said, eyeing the spot where her grandson fell in a burst of bullets. “You don’t just let a murder go like that. If they wanted to do something, they’d have dug deeper.”

Small Agencies Shoulder New Burdens

Homicides have mushroomed in smaller cities with fewer investigative resources. From 1990 through 1994, records show, slayings dipped 15% in the city of Los Angeles, but they rose 2% in the rest of the county.

Hawthorne has seen a rising number of homicide cases as its resources have dwindled.

Gang activity is widespread. Gunshots can be heard nightly. And state records show that killings doubled in that South Bay city--from 10 in 1991 to 21 in 1994--before dipping in the last two years. Though many Hawthorne cases are investigated by the Sheriff’s Department, the city’s detectives also must handle homicides, often while juggling staff shortages and relying on aging equipment.

“It’s a common feeling,” said Hawthorne Police Lt. Arvid Krueger of the frustration among investigators. “Some [police] departments have heavy workloads and may not have the resources to deal with it. Some days we feel simply overwhelmed.”

Detectives at one point stopped buying Polaroid film to photograph suspects because of the expense, and they used their own cellular phones because of the unreliability of police radios, said Krueger, who heads the homicide bureau.

Last year, a murder suspect who had fled to Birmingham, Ala., and was willing to surrender found himself caught in the budget crunch. Detectives were told the department could not afford plane tickets for them to escort the suspect back. Instead, the man was persuaded to return--alone and by bus--to Los Angeles County.

Laboratories Under Strain

Police investigators face not only heavy caseloads but also technical challenges to physical evidence by defense attorneys, and long waits for crime lab results.

Although detectives are loath to admit it, attorneys say, they sometimes respond with a form of triage--relying more on eyewitness accounts and less on physical evidence.

“If you’ve got 10 homicides all in one night, the chances of [the killers] getting away are greater,” said Deputy Public Defender Michael Clark, who reviews many cases as a senior advisor to trial attorneys.

“The big threshold thing is if [the detectives] have an eyewitness or named suspect. Then the evidence gathering immediately enters into an equation: Do I really want to bother calling all these [lab] guys? They will triage.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Wallace, who until recently prosecuted cases in the Compton courthouse, said officers sometimes decide they do not need to take fingerprints because they have witnesses.

“They don’t think in terms of a jury, six months down the road, [that] may like to know there were fingerprints,” Wallace said. Detectives figure “there just simply isn’t going to be the manpower” for the police lab to analyze it.

Attorneys say detectives also are leery of physical evidence that could come back to haunt them through highly technical challenges like those in the O.J. Simpson criminal case.

For example, the gunshot residue test used by law enforcement agencies on suspects in shooting cases is under increasing attack from defense attorneys. Gunshot residue can be transferred to the hands of a non-shooter by contact with a gun, so a positive test does not always mean a subject fired a weapon. Conversely, a negative test can be misleading because gunshot residue can be washed off.

In general, police officers routinely collect gunshot residue samples in homicide cases. But at the sheriff’s lab, they typically are stored to be analyzed months later, if at all, because each test can take a criminalist several hours.

The Sheriff’s Department moved to limit this type of testing in August 1995, saying it should be used more as an investigative aid than a courtroom tool--much to the chagrin of some investigators and prosecutors.

In the past, lab director Barry Fisher said, gunshot residue and other tests were often performed for “whoever cried the loudest, basically.” But in today’s tough fiscal times, he said, his lab must make tough choices, even while science is expected to play a growing role in solving homicides.

Backlogs Frustrate Investigators

Some homicide investigators remain skeptical about the ability of crime labs to keep abreast of forensic technology and meet an increasing demand for some of the types of sophisticated tests employed in the Simpson case.

For example, LAPD detectives point to an overworked crime lab that can take months or, in rarer instances, even years to analyze blood and bullet casings.

Detectives also complain that criminalists do not come to every murder scene. At times, they say, no scientific evidence is collected, and investigators have to settle for photographs of evidence such as pools of blood and bullet holes. In the past, LAPD ballistics examinations were sometimes so unreliable that in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, half a dozen murder cases collapsed.

In the LAPD South Bureau’s homicide unit, a stack of reports on aging murder cases is a constant reminder of a chronic backup in ballistics and other types of testing.

A year after a slaying, detectives often “still don’t know the type and caliber of weapon” used, said Det. Paul Mize. “Every day, the pile [of reports awaiting test results] gets higher. It’s frustrating.”

The type and caliber of a gun can be a crucial, first building block of a homicide investigation. Reports on similar guns seized or used in other crimes can be combed for leads. When test results are delayed for months, “how can we even tell . . . what we are looking for?” Mize asked.

Many investigators have come to view the county’s three crime labs--operated by the LAPD, the Sheriff’s Department and the coroner’s office--as choke points.

It often takes the impending start of a trial to get evidence analyzed.

“It’s not uncommon for the district attorney to call up and say, ‘The jury is picked and we want you to come to court next Tuesday. [We] can’t seem to find a lab report, [so] maybe you can send one over,’ ” said Fisher, director of the sheriff’s crime lab.

“And then you drop the news on them: ‘I hate to tell you this, guy. Nothing’s been done.’ ”

The sheriff’s lab last year received nearly 70,000 “submissions” or requests to perform tests--from serology to fingerprint analysis--in criminal cases including hundreds of homicide investigations. And the lab completed a smaller percentage than in 1991.

The backlog for ballistic tests and other examinations escalated from an average of 271 cases a month in 1991 to 380 in 1994. Over the last 12 months, records show the backlog averaged nearly 640 cases per month, with many of those added cases coming from the sheriff’s participation in a federal firearm tracing system called Drugfire.

In the LAPD lab--where more than 200,000 items of evidence are collected each year--tests for more than 600 slayings, robberies and other crimes are backed up at any given time, officials say.

“All I know is, in many of our units, we can’t get the work done we’re asked to do,” said Steven Johnson, who supervises scientific testing in the LAPD crime lab. “Everyone believes theirs is the most important case. It’s a juggling act.”

The firearms section handled 65% more homicide cases in 1994 than 1991, records show.

A few years ago, the testing backlog of several hundred cases prompted some judges to issue court orders to force the lab to complete tests.

Citing the “often pivotal” importance of firearms evidence in serious cases, then-chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Gregory Thompson warned the LAPD in a 1990 letter that prosecutors were being placed in “an untenable position” because test results were not available until just before trials.

In 1991, another internal district attorney’s office memo listed several murder cases in which errors in LAPD firearms testing led to dismissal of charges. The most embarrassing was a mismatch of bullets recovered from three slain women with a gun found in the car of a then-deputy sheriff, Rickey Ross. Ross was charged, but later was released by red-faced LAPD officials after other experts determined that the ballistics findings were “inconclusive.” The LAPD lab ultimately agreed.

Since then, additional personnel have been hired in the ballistics unit, and private contractors help with testing and training. LAPD officials, as well as some outside experts and prosecutors, say quality has improved and backlogs are down, but it often takes months to get results.

At the LAPD’s Piper Technical Center lab, chemical and blood analysis equipment is so outdated that suppliers laugh when employees request replacement parts. Microscopes in some units are discards from other government labs. Some work areas are jammed. And many criminalists write out their reports by hand because there are no word processors.

Unlike other major crime labs in California, the LAPD lab is not accredited by the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors. LAPD officials say they have applied for such accreditation but, until now, the crush of cases has made it impossible to free criminalists to develop required manuals and review protocols. And their lab space should be at least doubled to meet standards.

LAPD Chief Willie L. Williams declined to be interviewed for this series.

Former Police Chief Daryl F. Gates said that during his tenure he sought to upgrade the lab and apply for accreditation but always lacked the needed funds. “Back in the late 1980s, I begged . . . tried desperately to get [the lab] up to date,” said Gates, adding that LAPD criminalists began leaving to join the Sheriff’s Department.

The sheriff’s crime lab, which many in law enforcement circles judge superior to the LAPD’s, won its reaccreditation last year--but not without a critical inspection report that cited overcrowded conditions and improper evidence storage.

The inspectors found microscopes in the firearms section in poor condition and said that a laser device for examining latent fingerprints had been inoperative for a year.

Although sheriff’s officials said most problems have been corrected, the space shortage remains acute.

Lynne Herold, the supervisor of the physical evidence section, admitted that she worries about a challenge by defense attorneys over some testing conditions. “With all trace evidence [such as hair and fibers], you have to consider carefully the possibility of cross-contamination,” she said.

Officials say the sheriff’s crime lab should be seven times larger and its staff of 151 should increase by 50%. Also, the testing area for DNA analysis, located at County-USC Medical Center, is one-tenth the size that lab officials say is needed. This means the vast majority of DNA tests must be sent to private labs, slowing the speed of investigations.

Lost, meanwhile, are “investigative leads that could be developed further . . . if a certain amount of forensic examination would occur,” said Capt. Michael Soderberg, who oversees the sheriff’s lab.

Problems in the Field

Other problems arise before evidence even gets to the lab.

Criminalists trained to collect blood and trace evidence are called to murder scenes in less than 15% of cases, according to officials at the LAPD and sheriff’s labs, which handle most murder cases in the county.

Ten years ago, the sheriff’s criminalists responded to about 30% of murder scenes, Fisher estimated. And then the lab routinely sent two-person teams, which have since been trimmed to a single analyst.

In the last several years, trips to the field by the LAPD lab unit that handles homicides have fallen about 25%.

Though a dip last year in homicides may account for some of the decline, LAPD lab officials say chronic backlogs in processing evidence may be discouraging some detectives from calling. They have noticed that some police divisions, notably in the busy south end of the city, call out criminalists on a smaller share of murder cases.

Lt. Clay Farrell of the Newton Division said he hears “a lot of frustration about the lab because they are so overworked . . . to the point that you can’t get anything done in a timely fashion.”

At the coroner’s office, it also can take weeks in the crucial early phases of an investigation to get results of specialized testing related to murder autopsies.

In Downey last year, detectives say, they waited for more than four months for the coroner to rule on what caused the death of a man found in the back of a car. Even then, the cause of death was undetermined. “It [was taking] forever to get them to do something,” said Sgt. Jim Heckle. Lengthy testing, coupled with inadequate staffing, contributed to the delay, said county Coroner Lakshmanan Sathyavagiswaran.

Exacerbating such problems, the coroner’s staff has shrunk 13% since 1991, turnover is running high and caseloads have not improved appreciably since a 1990 audit warned that medical examiners were doing too many complex, full-scale homicide autopsies--nearly two a day.

Specialists Are Spread Too Thin

Medical examiners are not the only ones under siege.

On weekend shifts, four coroner’s investigators routinely cover the entire 4,000 square miles of the county “on a good day,” said Capt. Dean Gilmour, who oversees investigators and responds to cases.

One investigator, Dan Aikin, who currently works in the Antelope Valley, warned that the lack of investigators, criminalists and pathologists means homicides may go unnoticed.

Some bodies, which should be examined closely by the coroner’s department for signs of foul play, are “arbitrarily sent to mortuaries” because of the burgeoning caseloads, Aikin said.

Picking up a list of deaths during one busy Friday night shift, Aikin flipped through the pages and shook his head. “There’s 20 deaths here,” he said. “And I know there’s [probably] a homicide in here somewhere.”

While acknowledging that it is possible, coroner’s officials said missing a homicide would be a rare occurrence.

Coroner’s officials, detectives, prosecutors and outside experts also voice concerns about the potential for mistakes caused by the heavy caseloads.

Coroner department Director Anthony Hernandez agreed that with the financial squeeze, the office is running an increased “danger of a lot of things going wrong. You compromise the entire criminal justice system.”

Said former Ventura County Chief Medical Examiner Warren Lovell, now a forensic pathology consultant: “I generally have the feeling they are conscientious and do a good job, [but] they grind through cases.”

From the county morgue to crime labs to the detective squads, the handling of particularly time-consuming cases that capture public and media attention aggravates the logjam of lesser known cases, where lab officials typically urge investigators to be selective in requesting tests.

High-profile cases, and wealthy defendants who can assemble large teams of experts, force law enforcement crime labs to commit hugely disproportionate shares of their scarce time and resources. The Night Stalker case tied up several sheriff’s lab criminalists full time for two years in the mid-1980s. “That literally brought the lab to a standstill,” said Soderberg, the lab’s captain.

In the Simpson case, where the LAPD crime lab’s handling of evidence was a major issue, serology analysis alone consumed the equivalent of one full-time criminalist for three months. For all the criticism, many experts, detectives, prosecutors and defense attorneys agree it was the most thorough scientific analysis turned out by the beleaguered lab in years.

“This was by far the best work I’ve ever seen from the LAPD, and I’ve been doing this since 1972,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Peter Bozanich.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Seeking Solutions

Experts propose solutions to declining support services and resources that make homicides tougher to solve:

“Criminal justice, like every other government function, is a game of allocating scarce resources to the problems one cares most about. And the first thing that must be done . . . is to solidify the priority of criminal homicide as an important criminal justice issue--to say that we care more about this than we do about drug dealing.”

--Franklin E. Zimring,

professor of law and director

of the Earl Warren Legal

Institute, UC Berkeley

“You can never replicate a homicide scene once you have taken it down, so we have held homicide scenes for days until we are convinced we have exhausted every bit of relevant physical evidence . . . and that is not a luxury every agency has. . . . We have seven officers assigned as crime scene investigators, with training by the Sheriff’s Department on how to properly identify, collect, preserve and protect evidence. My experience with the LAPD was that was one of the missing links--the ability to spend time devoted to collecting physical evidence . . . [but] that is what it takes.”

--Torrance Police Chief Joseph

DeLadurantey, a former LAPD

captain

“[The lack of staff and resources] is a chronic problem throughout the country. There are some jurisdictions and some agencies that seem almost to be immune and have adequate funding and staffing . . . and did not have that type of backlog. But those I think are the exceptions rather than the rule. And the rule is one in which staffing in laboratories has not kept pace. . . . A lot of labs do quality work, but the way to demonstrate it is to undergo [a state accreditation] process. . . . I believe it raises the general public’s confidence level that a lab is putting out a quality product.”

--Dr. Vincent Crispino,

chief of Suffolk County,

N.Y., Crime Laboratory

“There is a 48-hour rule [in homicide cases] where if you haven’t solved it within that time, the possibility of solving homicides goes down rapidly. . . . What happens with some of these homicides is that [they go unsolved for years] . . . [but] if you take your best people, the most experienced people, and give them piles of old homicides . . . a good detective can get somewhere. . . . Philadelphia and Boston have both had success with ‘cold case’ squads.”

--Criminologist David

Cavanagh of Cambridge, Mass.

“Certainly the Simpson case taught us that our crime lab is less than perfect. . . . Our crime lab has been less than adequate for a long, long period of time. For years, the sheriff has had a better crime lab. . . . Our detectives would take cases over to the sheriff’s lab. This was shameful.”

--Former LAPD Chief

Daryl F. Gates

Reported by Times staff writer Greg Krikorian.