Justice in a Deep Freeze

Stacked inside two room-size freezers at the Sheriff Department’s central property facility in Whittier are nearly 1,200 samples of blood and semen taken from rape victims. Almost eight years have passed since some of the assaults occurred, yet, incredibly, this evidence still hasn’t been tested.

The Los Angeles Police Department has an even bigger backlog, perhaps 2,500 untested rape samples sitting in its freezers at Parker Center and elsewhere.

The state is now giving Los Angeles and other counties extra funds to help them clear their backlogs. But state and local officials need to do much more to fix this unconscionable situation and bust the criminals responsible, many of them presumably still free to victimize women.

Law enforcement agencies find themselves in a squeeze play: Rapes and other sex crimes are more often reported now. At the same time, advances in DNA technology allow scientists to determine a suspect’s unique genetic profile--to prove who the rapist was--from ever-smaller samples, sometimes as few as 13 cells. More assault victims are stepping forward and DNA testing is possible in more of these cases.

A state database now lets law enforcement agencies match DNA samples against the DNA of convicted offenders as well as against that of suspects in unsolved crimes, vastly improving the odds that the perpetrator will be caught. Yet lab analysis rigorous enough to stand up in court can take two to three weeks and costs $3,500 to $4,000 per case.

The workload has overwhelmed crime lab scientists. The Sheriff’s Department now has seven people who do this DNA analysis; it estimates that 45 are needed. The LAPD now has 11 analysts and says it needs four more.

What’s to be done? As a stopgap measure, the Board of Supervisors and the City Council should immediately fund extra staff and equipment for the crime labs. Local agencies already send some samples out to private labs for testing; in the short run at least, they need money to do more of this.

In the longer run, keeping samples out of deep freeze will require far greater cooperation between the sheriff and the LAPD on the design and joint operation of a proposed regional crime lab. The lab, now in the planning stage, will be built at Cal State L.A. and serve both agencies.

Shared use of the facility and equipment is certainly the most cost-effective approach. Yet turf squabbles between the agencies threaten that goal. DNA testing is done according to federal protocols, not city or county ones. There is no legal or scientific justification for insisting on separate facilities.

Police departments have made great efforts in recent years to encourage fearful victims of sexual assaults to come forward. For the sake of public safety, police have an obligation to aggressively investigate these cases. The full freezers are a chilling reminder of their failure.