Fourth Annual DNA Grantees' Workshop
Monday, June 23, 2003
AFTERNOON SESSION
Working Lunch
Lisa Forman, Moderator
Biography
DR. FORMAN: The government has rules that require that we have a speaker to allow us to pay for lunch. So we are fortunate to have someone who will talk with and at us who has a background of understanding and appreciation for the science we're all involved in. Dr. John Morgan is now the Acting Assistant Director of the National Institute of Justice. What that means is he's also the Acting Director of the Office of Science and Technology. He has been managing this agency and our portfolios for about the past 5 months, but before that, he was the science adviser to the Director of the National Institute of Justice.
Dr. Morgan's background is in physics. He developed mass spectrometry systems for detection of chemical and biological warfare agents. He has studied methods to protect aircraft from terrorist attacks and developed building and infrastructure protection agencies. His research interests have also included nondestructive evaluation—that's always good in a forensic context—spacecraft contamination control—contamination issues loom large in our lives here on the ground as well—high-temperature superconductivity, and also issues in DNA testing.
So Dr. Morgan's vast background directly relates to the kind of work and interests and issues that we have in forensic DNA testing. In addition to having this very strong background in the scientific arena, Dr. Morgan also has a very interesting political background, and at a very, very, very tender age began his work in the Maryland House of Delegates. He served 8 years in the Maryland House of Delegates and on the Judiciary, Ethics, Commerce, and Government Matters Committees.
We're very fortunate to have Dr. Morgan with us on a daily basis, and I'm very pleased and proud to present him to you today.
NIJ Programs and DNA Funding Opportunities (Part I)
John S. Morgan
Biography
DR. MORGAN: Thank you, Lisa. I'm not promising too much vision this morning. I don't want to sell too much here.
You all heard from Sarah Hart, our Director, here this morning. I'm very pleased to have a chance to work with Sarah and to have her insight as the leader of the National Institute of Justice. NIJ is an amazing place to be right now in this era. We have a unique responsibility to build research, development, evaluation, and knowledge for criminal justice.
Not only are we worrying about criminal justice and keeping people safe on a day-to-day basis, but we're also worrying about the implications of that in the counterterrorism arena, and we're working with our friends in homeland security to do that.
The Office of Science and Technology (OS&T) is the science and technology arm of NIJ. We are the techies among lawyers, and we work with the lawyers every day in our work. It makes for great challenges for us. We have to justify the funding of research and development and assistance to crime labs to the lawyers. We have to build technology that recognizes the legal and social impediments that exist when you're working in a free society. And, of course, as you all know, we have to justify the scientific evidence that we present before lawyers and judges in courts of law.
We at OS&T are very fortunate this year, I think. We have a very healthy program. Overall our budget is $207 million this year, of which $5 million goes toward the DNA research and development program. The DNA research and development program is unlike many of the others within NIJ in that it has predictable funding year after year, and it is a model that we want to apply in other technology areas as well.
Having predictable funding year after year creates groups like this—where you have researchers and practitioners who know that they can count on a particular level of funding and a particular level of effort from NIJ to support the activities—and gives us the ability to plan long-term and build programs that have much, much greater impact.
We're continuing to do many other activities within our forensic sciences budget this year. Forensic sciences make up about half of what OS&T is all about this year, as it has now for several years now, including our Crime Laboratory Improvement Program money and no-suspect casework grants, which are becoming much, much more successful and extensive. Last year the Attorney General supplemented the appropriation for no-suspect casework with $25 million of asset forfeiture funds. Those funds have now largely been put in the field, and we're continuing to make new grants in the no-suspect casework area and having enormous successes there.
Also, we are restructuring our convicted offender database program. It is now under a GSA contract and that has been a great challenge for NIJ. We previously had not done much program work under contract, so we have been through a great deal of growing pains with that.
Lisa likes to show me this map, which is comparable to the map of Napoleon's march into and retreat from Russia. It's roughly comparable in complexity to put out a contract for convicted offender analysis of samples. It is a testament to her fortitude and the fortitude of our staff that we now have actually gotten the first State, Virginia, awarded under that contract, and it is also a testament to her fortitude and vision that the way in which the contracts are structured reflects a commitment that NIJ has long held, which is to defer to the States in how they want the work done.
This isn't a one-size-fits-all contract that everyone has to fit into the same cookie cutter. It really defers to the judgments of the State administrators in terms of how the samples are done and what the commercial vendors are providing, and that has been an enormous success for us.
Outside of the forensic science division, we've had an awful lot of interesting developments lately. It's been a great challenge for me over the past several months to take over what has been an extraordinarily successful effort in assisting State and local officials.
There's a couple of things that I want to mention to you specifically because they impact on the thinking that we have in the forensic science division and also give you some insight into where we're going as an organization. We have deemphasized some things on counterterrorism. We have sloughed off several areas from NIJ: chemical and biological warfare detection and response and radiological and nuclear response. We are no longer going to be doing significant work, research work especially, in these areas.
As a result, we're able to reemphasize some other things that we feel are more important to day-to-day law enforcement. In particular, one of those areas is explosives. For some time, we've been talking to the FBI, which is something that we like to do, about explosives remediation and response. This year, NIJ is actually taking over responsibility for the sponsorship of something called the National Association of Bomb Squad Commanders (NABSC). It's basically a technical working group (TWG) for bomb squad commanders.
The FBI recognizes that it needs to refocus on its law enforcement mission and as a result, has come to an agreement with NIJ that NIJ will fund the NABSC, sponsor the NABSC, and actually give it technical support. As we move forward, I think this is an interesting model that will have some impact within the forensic sciences, and as we build a better cooperative relationship with the FBI.
Elsewhere, NIJ and OS&T are going to be taking a leadership role in the Global Justice Information Sharing Initiative (GLOBAL)—an advisory committee on information-sharing standards within the Office of Justice Programs (OJP)—and in other information-sharing initiatives within OJP. This is going to have several implications for how these efforts move forward. Not only will we be coordinating GLOBAL, but we're also going to be building on GLOBAL's successes with respect to XML (extensible markup language) standards promulgation, which is something that I think is going to be extraordinarily important to public safety agencies' ability to operate and be efficient in the long term. That includes crime labs and the ability of crime labs to share information with their law enforcement partners, courts, and so on.
We're also going to be working with SEARCH—a method of assistance to State information technology in public safety operated by the Bureau of Justice Statistics—and NIBRS (National Incident-Based Reporting System) development activities, which I think are very, very crucial in the long run as well. We'll continue our traditional work in data mining and information-sharing research and development, and we'll also be doing some new initiatives: for example, providing information-sharing guidance to State and local agencies so that they look at information sharing as one big technological architecture—instead of thinking the crime lab is here, the police agency is here, the prosecutor is here, and the court is over there. That includes being able to have laboratory information management systems that allow crime labs and other entities to talk to each other.
We'll also be doing more in mobile data as well, which is of less importance to forensic science but of great importance to law enforcement.
Earlier when she [Lisa Forman] gave her talk, she was making light to some extent of the history of the DNA grantees' meetings. But as I look around this room, I see the incredible number of people who are here, not only from the research community but also from the practitioner community, and I see the seriousness of purpose and the seriousness of the result that she and the forensic science division have achieved. That's a result of many things, including leadership, intelligence, good humor, drive, and more than anything else, passion. It all can make Lisa very annoying some days.
DR. FORMAN: Most days.
DR. MORGAN: Most days? She says most days. I said some days.
But it also makes her extraordinarily effective, because in the government, as in many other things but especially in the government, passion really is what makes things happen, and we're very fortunate to have her.
The other big development that Sarah was talking about earlier today in OS&T and for NIJ is the DNA initiative. The DNA initiative is a rare opportunity. It is not every day that somebody comes along and wants to spend hundreds of millions of dollars more a year in crime labs, and the DNA initiative is exactly that.
Sarah talked to you about some of it, but I wanted to make a couple of very specific points about the initiative. One of them is that, although the money is meant for DNA and to build the capacity of crime labs in the DNA area, I believe that it will be extraordinarily important to the crime labs across the board in building their capabilities. It's going to put personnel resources into crime labs, it's going to put training into crime labs, it's going to put automation into crime labs, that will help in all the forensic disciplines.
One point that has been made by some folks is that 97 percent of the evidence that comes into the crime lab is not DNA. And that is true, that's very, very true. But I would also point out, in response to that, that for violent crime, DNA's ability to identify and provide evidence to convict is unparalleled, and it is the violent crime, more than any other, that we really care about in the end.
I would rather solve one rape or murder than 100 drug cases. Now, those drug cases are important because they can obviously lead to other crimes. But DNA, because of its power as an identifier, is an extraordinarily important tool and an extraordinary need that this country has in building our capacity to use it. That's not only in the crime lab but in the courtroom as well.
The third point I would make about the DNA initiative, and it's something that's rather unique to me in my business, and that is I see DNA as the great seller of science and technology for law enforcement; that is, it's to law enforcement what the atomic bomb was to the military. Back in the 1940s, no or very little money was being put into science and technology for the defense of our country. But everyone understood after World War II just what science and technology could do to make our military more effective. We still see that today, even just recently in Iraq.
I believe that DNA can play that same role with respect to law enforcement and criminal justice technology in general, because it has such a revolutionary and visible impact on how effective criminal justice can be. It can actually reduce crime. It can actually be demonstrated to reduce crime.
As a selling point for technology investments in criminal justice, which are extraordinarily needed, DNA is again unique, an extraordinary tool for us as an agency that believes in building up State and local capacity in technology and criminal justice. I think DNA will be a great seller.
We have some overarching objectives that we've had in the past and that we're going to continue. Bringing new science to practice is our number one priority. I have to congratulate this community more than any other in that regard. The DNA community has done more to leverage the advances in human genetics than I think anyone expected.
It's been a great, great success story, and it's a success story that we want to build on. There's emerging technologies still out there: DNA on a chip technology, the emerging SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms), and the wonderful work that we're seeing in the mitochondrial area. We face great challenges in bringing such technologies to the field but we will surmount those and bring that great technology to use.
We will provide assistance to crime labs. We have done more, I believe, than any other agency to worry about State and local crime labs, to give direct funding assistance and technical assistance through the Forensic Resource Network, and to advocate for the crime lab community. There's been plenty of times when NIJ was the only player advocating for crime labs and that's something that Lisa and I and the rest of the OS&T community take very seriously.
We will also support the work of technical and scientific working groups in the forensic sciences and promulgate their standards of practice. In the past few years, we've built closer working relationships with our Federal brethren, and we're seriously committed to continuing that with our friends at the FBI, with our friends in the Federal crime lab community, with the people in the new Homeland Security Department, and with the people at the technical support working group who also build research and development for the forensic sciences. By working those relationships, we feel that we can leverage a great deal of knowledge and a great deal of the other people in the government who care about crime labs and make you guys better and better each and every year.
So this is an exciting time, with lots of new faces and new challenges for us, and I'm very, very blessed to be in the position that I am. I take it very seriously, and I know that the rest of the staff in the investigation and forensic science division does too. It is an extraordinary group of people, and it's a great privilege to be here.
I have the challenge of being the lunch speaker. It's very difficult to do that. I'm going to tell one more joke, and it's about the guy whose boss noticed that he wasn't paying attention during the speech that he gave. The boss came up to him and challenged him on it and so on. The young employee said: Oh, yes, yes, sir; I really—it just looked like I wasn't paying attention. Actually I was, and you actually inspired me to meditate on the mission statement and envision a new paradigm.
So I hope that, at the very least, I've allowed you to do some meditating and digesting this afternoon. And thank you for coming here to our DNA grantees' meeting and hearing all about this wonderful science. Thank you.
Are there any questions or does anybody want to test the OS&T director today?
(No response.)
Okay.
DR. FORMAN: Thank you very much, Dr. Morgan.
I want to just tell everyone in this room that he's been there 5 months. It feels like he's been there forever, in a good way. It's a pleasure to work with John Morgan. He is truly a fine scientist and understands the struggles and needs of both the practitioner and research communities. So it's a pleasure to have him at our helm.