DNA: Expanding the Collection of Evidence to Property Crimes

Presentation to the National Institute of Justice
Kathy Browning, Senior Social Science Analyst
March 14, 2007

We've been doing the DNA demonstration project for a little over a year now. We started in October of 2005, and we're using DNA initiative funds for this project. And essentially what we're doing is very simple. We have given 5 sites money to expand DNA collection to property crimes.

A lot of localities are already doing that, obviously, in violent offenses. And many want to move to property crimes, but they don't have the resources. So we said, "We'll give you the resources. We’re gonna look at it and see if this is cost effective." Are we gonna get more bad guys this way? Or is this just gonna be spinning our wheels using resources and not getting anything out of it? So we are in 5 sites. 2 in California, Orange County and L.A., we're in Denver, Colorado; Phoenix, Arizona; and Topeka, Kansas.

That's our small site, obviously. We're doing an experiment here. It's a randomized control trial. It's 18 months, although it's being extended, because it's taking a little bit longer to get through it. I'm going to be explaining why throughout the presentation. But essentially what happened is all of these cities have chosen some location, some part, so we're not doing all of L.A., although we are doing most of Denver. But they've chosen a part of their city to focus on.

They're going out. They're starting to collect DNA evidence, biological evidence, wherever they see it in property crimes. Some of them are doing just residential burglaries. Some are doing commercial burglary. And in Topeka, they're actually doing theft from auto.

They're collecting it wherever they see it and then bringing it to the lab. And at that point, we're randomly assigning it to our test and treatment. Because we want to see do we get more bad guys using DNA evidence than we do using the standard, um... investigative techniques. Um, the urban institute is conducting the evaluations.

There's a lot of variability. This is one of the fun things about social science is that there's a lot of natural variation between these sites, so who's collecting the evidence varies. In some sites, it's the actual responding officer is collecting the site — I mean, collecting the evidence that in others you've got — everybody calls it something different, but it's essentially the CSI person, somebody with some kind of technical training. Um, we started in October.

I'm not gonna give you a lot of numbers. Cause we really don't have a whole lot of numbers at this point to share. But our goal was to get 250 test cases and 250 controls or 500 cases in each one of these sites, and we have reached that number. And initially, our goal was to quickly have that done by the end of March, but we've only hit that in one of the sites. But we're getting closer.

Phoenix and Denver will be ending pretty soon, and Topeka and L.A. are kind of lagging behind. It sounds pretty simple. You've already been collecting DNA evidence in violent offenses so just start collecting it in property crimes. Seems like a simple thing to do. Well, it turns out, it's not so simple to do that, because "a" — most of these sites do not have CSI technicians, they can't send the same people who do homicides and rapes to the property offenses.

So now we have shifted the responsibility down the chain, I guess, to somebody who hasn't normally done this. And in some cases, they're asking responding officers to actually collect the evidence, and they've never done this. They're comfortable with crimes, but not so much with DNA evidence. So, um... It's actually been a huge change in a lot of these jurisdictions.

Even when the responding officer is not collecting the evidence, they have to recognize that it's there. And one of the things that we've learned is that in many police departments, the officers are pretty used to — they just go to a burglary. They don't think — the clearance rate is very low. In burglary, they take some fingerprints, and then take a statement and move on.

So it really has been a shift in their mindset to say "ok, let's be creative about where we can get this biological material." We have found that — in the first... When we began, did some training, did a round of training, that training varied by site based on their need. And we found that one-shot training was not enough.

Sometimes you have to be kind of creative about where you can look and what you can get it from — get the DNA from. Um... The other thing is — this is typical of any kind of change that you would have probably in any bureaucracy, but definitely in any police department. There were glitches in the beginning of officers not being clear on who to call and when to call and all that.

So we actually got off to a little slower start than we had hoped. What I want to do is just — 'cause it's more interesting to look at actual cases. And so you'll get a better feel of what we're doing. Are we just getting these relatively minor burglars, or are these — our thought going into this, are burglars involved in a lot of other offenses? And so we wanted to see what kind of offenders we were getting. Obviously in this project, you're not going to get — we're not going to be getting first-time offenders here, because the way — just back up a little bit.

The way we get offenders through the DNA is by — we get the DNA at the crime scene, and then they run it against the DNA database. And so it's convicted offenders in most places. So... Um... this was a case from Denver, Michael Davis. He actually — he and his partner in crime, whose name was "sweetie pie", they were actually very active burglars.

They actually started in Ohio. And Michael Davis got into the database in Ohio there for I don't know which offense, but they did robbery, burglary, assault, and I think there were weapons charges. And then they moved to Denver and started committing crimes there. So he was leaving his DNA all over the place. They have one where they got it from the candy coin. They actually got blood at one of the scenes because the victim — the homeowner had walked in and hit him on the head before he left, so he left some blood.

They connected him to a lot. They got him to pretty much confess and go around and tell them some of the other crimes that they didn't even know. He confessed to about 54 crimes. So he's now — he got 21 years. In Topeka, one of their examples was, uh... A guy who had started as a juvenile, which many of these — so far of what we've seen, that a lot of them have. Um, moves in to theft and possession and weapon, domestic battery, burglary. So these are not just burglars.

A couple of cases from L.A. — everybody presented theirs a little different — was a case that they made the DNA match off of the cigarette. And... Uh... The guy that's been charged in that offense is 32 years old, has 10 prior arrests, 2 prior convictions for robbery and burglary. So again, not just a burglar.

In another case — this is a commercial burglary — where they suspect it's a former employee. Again, 35 prior arrests, 23 prior convictions for a list of things. And this, I just tell for the fun factor. Um...in this case, actually, a guy had broken into a house.

Actually — well, back up. The homeowner there has a deadbolt lock, but he never uses it. So he left the house, and when he came back, he realized the deadbolt was on, which led him to suspect that something was wrong. So I don't know whether he actually knocked on the door or he was just jiggling it. The burglar comes and answers the door.

At which time, I think the burglar realized that that was a mistake and then took off. So the guy, apparently, had just been hanging out in the house for a while and had taken some stuff, and he left his DNA all over the place. So, um, you know... The offender that's been charged in this still has 5 prior convictions for burglary, vandalism, auto theft. These are people who don't tend to do very well on probation or parole.

So what do we expect to learn from this study? The basis of the evaluation is to look at cost effectiveness. So we want to look at how much additional cost does this put on the process. And then what do we get out of it? Do we get more arrests? Do we get more people? But that's just a small part, I think, of what we're actually gonna learn. We're gonna learn a lot that I think will be helpful to other jurisdictions that are thinking about doing this, because, as I said in the 5 studies, there's been a lot of variation.

Some things have worked. Some things have not. And I think we'll be able to guide people if they're thinking about doing this. And give them some idea of what they might want to focus on. We've learned a lot, the hard way, about training. What kind of training, the repeated training, is needed, especially when you're bringing in people who are not familiar with this and may not be comfortable with the, um... with this new — it's new to them — process.

We'll learn some of the pros and cons. about having, whether it's good to have — whether it's just fine to have the responding officer collect the data, collect the evidence, or whether it really, you know, is better to have somebody more experienced there. And also some of the organizational challenges that it takes in trying to implement this.

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