Analyzing a Turnaround

The folks around the Los Angeles Police Department’s crime lab don’t like to admit it, but the public flogging they endured four years ago during the O.J. Simpson murder trial was a bitter blessing in disguise.

Had Simpson’s lawyers not portrayed the facility as a “cesspool of contamination” filled with incompetent criminalists, the place probably would not be what it is today: an accredited crime lab packed with millions of dollars of state-of-the-art equipment.

“Fairly or unfairly, the trial highlighted some of the problems we had been having for years,” said Michele E. Kestler, the lab’s director, who testified during the Simpson case. “We have emerged a better laboratory as a result.”

For a lab that plays such a vital role in convicting tens of thousands of criminals every year, the improvements were overdue and sorely needed.

“It was criminally embarrassing, and it was shameful,” said Councilwoman Laura Chick of the way the lab was depicted during the Simpson trial.

“We learned a very hard lesson,” added Chick, chairwoman of the city’s Public Safety Commission. “We cannot let the crime lab slip from our view again. Sometimes it takes something like that to have the will to correct it. We must always assure that our lab is beyond reproach.”

Established in 1923, the lab was the first such facility in the nation. Since then, it has been instrumental in investigating the city’s most notorious crimes, such as the 1947 Black Dahlia murder and the 1969 “Manson family” slayings. The lab has been emulated throughout the country and depicted by Hollywood as a leader in forensic science. Today, even some of the smallest police agencies have crime laboratories.

The sterile interior of the LAPD lab gives little hint of the gruesome pieces of evidence analyzed there day in and day out: blood-drenched clothing, letters that detail murder plots, twisted bullets and spent casings, semen from rapists, fibers from cords used to strangle people, gunk scraped from under corpses’ fingernails, an endless assortment of mind-bending drugs and an arsenal of weapons.

Evidence is weighed, photographed, dissected.

Far from relying on a trusty magnifying glass like the fictional Sherlock Holmes, today’s criminalists use elaborate electron microscopes, lasers and high-powered computers to help solve crimes.

Pieces of evidence, often too small to be seen by the naked eye, can mean the difference between convicting a guilty man and letting him go free.

At the LAPD, criminalists are professionally trained civilian employees who wear white lab coats instead of shiny badges. They often get called out to crime scenes in the middle of the night to help collect and identify evidence. The LAPD has experts in finger and shoe prints, firearms, handwriting and many other fields.

Although the department’s lab was nationally regarded for many years, by the mid-1980s it had started showing signs of serious neglect and age. It was understaffed, overburdened, poorly equipped and financially strapped. City officials routinely denied budget requests for new equipment each year. Funds earmarked for the lab mysteriously ended up in other departments’ budgets.

Chemical and blood analysis equipment was so outdated just a few years ago that suppliers laughed at employees when they requested replacement parts. Microscopes in some lab units were discards from other government labs.

Although the criminalists’ work in those days, by and large, was professional, their performance suffered at times. There were errors in firearms testing and tremendous backlogs in ballistic and blood analyses. Detectives grumbled about receiving analytical findings from the lab after trials were over. Former Chief Daryl F. Gates in an interview several years ago recalled that LAPD detectives occasionally took their cases to the Sheriff’s Department for lab work.

And it was no fun for the overworked criminalists either. Some left the LAPD for jobs at better-equipped labs, like the Sheriff’s Department’s.

Verbal Attacks Exposed Problems

But the darkest days for the crime lab occurred during the Simpson trial. In 1995, the lab was ripe for some unfavorable scrutiny. Defense attorneys ripped into the way evidence was collected, stored and analyzed. The withering attacks exposed the political and bureaucratic neglect that had taken their toll over the years. The credibility of the lab was undermined.

“There were unbelievably bad practices there,” said defense attorney Barry Scheck, a professor at New York’s Cardozo Law School who led the assault on the LAPD lab during the Simpson trial. “Everybody recognizes that the practices were woefully substandard.”

He said the improvements in the LAPD facility, as well as reforms at other forensic labs throughout the nation, were “the only silver lining” of the Simpson trial.

Indeed, the Simpson case heightened the police and political hierarchy’s attention to crime lab officials’ long-unanswered pleas for new facilities, updated equipment and better training.

Since 1995, the LAPD has added 32 employees to the lab, spent about $500,000 on new training programs and invested about $3 million in facility and equipment upgrades. Those have ranged from smoke alarms and emergency eyewash stations to high-tech equipment used for analyzing DNA and identifying drugs in blood and urine.

Most important, the lab earned the approval of the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors accreditation board, which awarded the much-maligned facility a national accreditation certificate.

Only about one-third of U.S. laboratories are accredited. In California, just seven of the 19 county and municipal labs are accredited, authorities say.

Earning the accreditation was not an easy task. Criminalists spent hundreds of hours creating detailed manuals and documenting every aspect of the lab.

After the Simpson trial, Kestler said, the criminal

ists were eager to earn the accreditation to prove that they perform professionally.

“It was a validation,” she said.

To become accredited, lab officials had to upgrade the evidence intake area, which came under fire during the Simpson trial. Today, every shred of evidence is locked up and what lawyers call “the chain of custody” is thoroughly documented.

Certainly city officials hope that the investment in the lab--and the accreditation--will restore public confidence in the way the LAPD collects, secures and analyzes evidence.

But despite the improvements, the lab still has a number of challenges ahead.

The biggest issue, perhaps, is a severe overcrowding problem. According to a state audit released in December, the LAPD has the second worst ratio of space per criminalist among all California crime labs.

During a recent tour of the lab, most of which is at Piper Technical Center near downtown Los Angeles, as many as nine criminalists were analyzing drugs in a work space built for four. At the trace evidence unit, four criminalists toiled in an office more appropriate for one.

Because space is so limited, certain lab functions, such as firearms and fingerprint analysis, are carried out at different locations throughout the city.

Now, there are two crime lab proposals circulating in governmental circles. One is county Supervisor Mike Antonovich’s plan to merge the LAPD and sheriff’s crimes labs. Another, favored by the LAPD and Sheriff’s Department, seeks to keep the two labs as separate entities but consolidate their operations in one large facility, possibly at Cal State L.A.

More Money for Training Needed

In addition to the space crunch, the LAPD needs more money to send its criminalists to professional training programs to keep them current on the latest techniques and technology in forensic science. The state’s audit recommends that the LAPD annually spend about $1,000 per technical staff employee--about $101,000 a year. In 1997, the department had no money budgeted for such training.

The precipitous drop in crime has had little effect on workloads at the lab because detectives are solving more cases and are reopening old files. Today it can still take months to analyze blood and bullet casings.

Soon, the LAPD lab will be tapping into a powerful FBI database of DNA records for tracking sexual criminals. The database is a source of great excitement to criminalists because sex offenders often are repeat criminals, so tracking them and linking crimes could pay huge dividends to law enforcement.

Cmdr. David J. Kalish, an LAPD spokesman, called the department’s criminalists “unsung heroes” who “play invaluable roles in fighting crime.”

“They work under difficult conditions and yet have performed admirably,” he added. “We’re very proud of them.”

For Kestler, the lab’s director, the recent accolades from the department and city officials are appreciated but not something to take for granted.

“We need to police ourselves,” she said. “We must always be able to show that our work is of the highest quality.”

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Crime Lab Quality Control

The O.J. Simpson murder trial in 1995 exposed the Los Angeles Police Department’s crime lab to criticism that its equipment was outdated and its investigations were shoddy, prompting improvements in the facility and expansion of its staff. The following is a look at crime labs in California.

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Training Square budget footage/ Laboratory Total staff 1997-98 employees Huntington Beach police 11 $4,750 245 Long Beach police 18 $7,229 180 Los Angeles police 149 None 244 L.A. County sheriff 137 $107,091 255 Orange County sheriff 129 $24,463 930 Sacramento County D.A. 34 $22,050 1,294 San Bernardino County sheriff 84 $7,500 296 San Diego police 64 $6,000 363 San Diego County sheriff 47 None 957 San Francisco police 16 None 328 Ventura County sheriff 41 None 434

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Source: California state auditor, Dec. 1998