Fourth Annual DNA Grantees' Workshop

Wednesday, June 25, 2003

AFTERNOON SESSION

Practitioner Session #3: Technology Solutions in the Crime Lab
Jan Bashinski, Moderator
Biography

MS. BASHINSKI: Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to the penultimate or I guess the ultimate session of this conference.

First of all, I'd like to thank NIJ for an excellent seminar. I think we've all learned a lot, and hopefully this last discussion will be something that we will all enjoy as well.

I'm Jan Bashinski. More than a year ago, I retired from the California Department of Justice, so I'm lucky to be here at all. Again, I'd like to thank NIJ for letting me be here to see all of the wonderful progress that's being made in the field. From my perspective, it's really a lot of fun to watch and see where we are today, knowing and being very painfully aware of where we came from and how long and hard it has been to get here. It's been a wonderful ride and I think it's just beginning, and with the help of the Federal Government and the tremendous energy and synergy of all of the practitioners and researchers, I think we have nothing but great successes in the future. It's just a wonderful thing to see.

Our topic for this session is technology and how we can use technology to solve some of the problems that we have in our crime labs. The presentations will be formal but brief because we want to spark dialogue and discussion among the panel and the audience, among researchers and practitioners.

In planning this, we thought that the first thing to do was to figure out what bottlenecks exist. We've heard a lot of discussion over the last two-and-a-half days about the various issues and problems in labs and attempts to address them, and you'll hear a little bit more about that from this panel this afternoon.

We want to leave a lot of time for discussion and questions because it's our hope that the main aspect of this will be that we raise issues. We'll give you some of our perspective on how we think these things can be addressed, but then we want to hear how others have addressed some of these problems and maybe about vehicles we can use in the future to work together to address them.

Process of Doing Nonsuspect Cases
Sindey Schueler
Biography

(Note: The overhead slide presentation that supplements Ms. Schueler's transcript is not available.)

MS. BASHINSKI: Our first speaker is Sindey Schueler. She's the supervisor of the biology unit at KBI Laboratory. She's been very active in SWGDAM (Scientific Working Group on DNA Analysis Methods), and she's on the CODIS (Combined DNA Index System) Software Subgroup. I think software is an issue that we're all very interested in because I think it's going to give us a lot of solutions in the future. She's been working with a lot of validation studies and other work with DNA.

MS. SCHUELER: Well, I don't have a PowerPoint because in Kansas we don't have any technology. We do have Dorothy, though, but we don't have technology.

NIJ forced us [KBI] to look at our process of doing nonsuspect cases when we actually wanted to apply for overtime. Of course, we identified the bottlenecks. It was screening the human, actually identifying the stains, describing the evidence and how it's sealed, and documenting it in writing on worksheets.

The thing I was most surprised about was labeling tubes. We spend an enormous amount of time just labeling tubes, and then of course, DNA interpretation and report writing takes time too.

As I was reviewing the cases, I became very depressed to learn that my DNA examiners were actually clerical staff. So then it was about lunchtime, and I went to Wendy's. You know, they have those touch screens. I went back to the lab and realized that Wendy's has more technology than our forensic lab. It was very, very depressing.

That's why I would like to see NIJ help support getting more technology in the screening part. How are we going to feed the robotics? How are we going to feed the expert systems? Because the very first thing is identifying the stains, getting them cut out, and getting them through the robotics systems.

I would be interested to see how many labs are using touch screens or voice activation to identify stains and to do sealing or are using computerized systems to generate worksheets. After you identify the stain, you can take a digital photograph and put it in your computer system. If should prompt you: Stain A is this big or did you run your controls correctly. Computerized systems can give you everything that ASCLD (American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors) wants, so when auditors come in they aren't sifting through all the pages and looking for initials and page and case numbers.

We can use our time more efficiently if we can use expert systems or just the technology to set up some QA–QC (quality assurance-quality control) standards. That way we don't need humans to worry about QA–QC steps. Let the system prompt you: did you look for your control, did you run your control, is it sealed, and is it identified. We should start getting some of this technology into the lab.

I'm not asking for the Outback Steakhouse or anything, but I would like to bring it up at least to McDonald's or Wendy's. So if anybody has any ideas, I'd like to see some resources put into this area.

MS. BASHINSKI: Let me first ask the panel if you have any comments on Sindey's remarks, because I think everybody's a little bit frustrated in this particular area. The panel may be able to comment—from Sindey's talk—on the things that they have done in their own laboratories or on other suggestions regarding software solutions or other assistance.

(No response.)

I guess they're rebelling. Maybe we should go through all of the talks and then we'll have a discussion. I guess that's probably a good idea, because some of these things will be coming out as we go along, so I think we'll all feed off of each other's ideas.