DOCTOR CROW: Well, it's time for the crime scene investigation work group.

Mr. Gainer.

TERRY GAINER: Thank you. We did meet on the 28th of June in Washington, D.C., and it was a well attended meeting and talked, I believe, about at least three major areas, one of which was just finishing up the cover graphics of the brochure that we were to get out, and I believe there is concurrence on that.

I don't know if there is examples here of that, Chris, or not.

CHRISTOPHER ASPLEN: Yes.

TERRY GAINER: That was probably one of the easier ones we did. We also had a -- we probably spent a majority of the meeting with the professors from Eastern Kentucky University talking about the distance learning that we want to do in this area and how that should be done, how long the training should be, what should be in the training, who the target of that training would be, and the professors, whose name escape me from Eastern Kentucky. I think there was a full meeting in Santa Fe, too, and did a presentation, are working that up, and are going to give us some proposals, and really use that brochure as a basis for what that CD training ought to look like.

And they had given us some examples during that meeting of other work they have done, and, you know, both Terry and Darrell are here from that meeting if they want to, and obviously Chris want to add to that, but it was pretty straightforward. We spent quite a bit of time talking about the strength and the weaknesses of that and what the -- what the uniformed officer might need, the investigator responding, what some crime scene people could use, the universality of the CD training and how important we think that is.

And I do believe when we get some feedback from them -- due when, Chris? That I don't recall.

CHRISTOPHER ASPLEN: By the next meeting, which is scheduled.

ROBIN STEELE WILSON: First week of August.

TERRY GAINER: They will have their outline of that CD-ROM?

CHRISTOPHER ASPLEN: Correct.

TERRY GAINER: I believe that is the sum and substance of that. We probably -- one of the areas that I think we want we agreed at the subcommittee meeting we wanted to see if generates some discussion here was an issue, I think, that Chris first raised about making a recommendation to the Attorney General concerning the need to invigorate action within police training circles of technology in general, and the DNA training specifically, and we had quite a bit of back and forth on that, because on first blush it appeared to some of us that if we went forward with this interim proposal, which obviously would be part of a final commission report to the Attorney General that on first blush one might think that we were saying that law enforcement or criminal justice was not doing what it was supposed to do in the area of training, and I think Chris and others made certain, as I recall Darrell did, too, that is not what we were trying to say, only that technology in many areas is changing so quickly that there just probably hasn't been the police resources dedicated to the keeping up with that technology and training us to that level. And then there was discussion about whether that is precisely what would be the ultimate outcome of this whole commission, or our subcommittee, and I think we at least left that with mixed emotions.

Chris, do you want to try to phrase your point of view on this little deal.

CHRISTOPHER ASPLEN: One of -- one of the issues that came up early on in that working group's work, and I think it really first came up in the Dallas meeting was the nature and extent of law enforcement training in general and the extent to which most law enforcement agencies find themselves with inadequate funding to train their police departments to train their officers, be it their academies or be it their continuing education, be it role departments or larger urban departments, that training is always an issue, and education is always an issue.

That dynamic combined with the lesson that we have learned through the DNA experience, and by that lesson, I mean the extent to which DNA developed in the United States really as a prosecutorial tool before it developed as an investigative tool, it developed as a way to prove cases in court, not really to solve cases at first, and the issue of the lack of nonsuspect cases being worked. The question came up whether or not this commission could make a recommendation to the Attorney General that would suggest to her that we need to look at or assess the issue of law enforcement training and education from a much broader perspective and need to reassess our commitment to law enforcement training and education.

Again, as the chief said, the issue is not is law enforcement doing enough to train their people. The issue is does law enforcement have enough resources, be they personnel, or be they financial to educate their officers to the level that is necessary?

And that the DNA example comes in importantly in that we are only going to ask our law enforcement officers to use technology more, not less. Technology and law enforcement's ability to access it and to implement it is only going to become a bigger issue; and if we don't move along with that dynamic, training law enforcement officers and empowering them to use technology more and more, we are quite frankly just not going to protect our citizenry, as well as we could have otherwise. So that is the issue that arose.

TERRY GAINER: And I can clarify it. I remember you discussing about the DNA in technology that it seemed the whole DNA technology conversation started from the court in the prosecutorial end versus the DNA being used as a police investigative tool, which is contrary to the United Kingdom experience.

CHRISTOPHER ASPLEN: Exactly.

TERRY GAINER: So the discussion was: Did we police maybe miss some opportunities X amount of years ago to be on a cutting edge of where DNA technology should have put us from an investigative point of view and whether, in the other segue I think you were making, Chris, was is there some other piece of technology that we ought to be thinking about from the law enforcement perspective that we would be looking at ten years from now.

CHRISTOPHER ASPLEN: And one thing that we recognized early on was that that is not the charge of this commission, but rather should this commission use DNA as the example to say you need to do something else like a commission like a law enforcement technology summit to call the appropriate members of the community together to begin to evaluate that issue.

JEFFREY THOMA: I'm just going to add one thing from the meeting that I came away with that I really appreciated is law enforcement's willingness to adopt or adapt rather to the change and take on the resources is a key component to getting to this, and I think that working group was a good indication of that. I think both Terrys were talking about from the perspective of a lot of the simple training that goes on really goes on in roll call and that type of thing, but we have to think about and implement even more broad training to see when somebody comes to a scene, okay, you have got to look for more things than you ever did and look at the scene a differentway, especially if you are the chief person that is going to be taking in the evidence, and I was very impressed with that change in perspective and that willingness to do that.

Again, I think if we do get back to the resources issue, because you have only got so much time of your troops, the people in the field, and you have only got so much money to use to train them more. So that was a very good meeting.

PAUL FERRARA: The other result of that, too, Jeffrey, is we have found that as we have trained our law enforcement agencies more and more as to what we can do and the sensitivity and the specificity of the methods have improved, the volume of evidence, not just the number of cases, but the volume of items of evidence that are being collected and possess potentially probative investigative information is skyrocketing, and that is partially due, you know, partial cause of the backlog problems.

JEFFREY THOMA: And my point is that the law enforcement is willing to accept that challenge, and they are really doing what they can.

PAUL FERRARA: And I don't want to discourage law enforcement for doing just that.

DOCTOR REILLY: Are you -- Paul, are you saying that in a way to suggest that it's an embarrassment that actually will present a problem in the future of the caseload?

PAUL FERRARA: It already is, Phil, and I think it is partially responsible, I know in Virginia, for a lot of the backlog problem, but we don't discourage it in any way, shape, or form. It's just simply a recognition that the resources for the law enforcement to be able to collect this evidence and recognize it, and for the laboratory to have the resources to handle that volume and complexity of items, because now you are talking about cigarette butts, and obviously, I don't need to elaborate, all of the multiplicity of samples in a given case, and so we are spending -- I think laboratories in general are going to be spending a lot more time on a single case, but that is a good thing.

TERRY GAINER: We also talked about the overreliance on technology and detectives losing those abilities that they should have to interviews and interrogations and tie evidence together that if the tendency were just to gather everything that you see at a scene and literally take the room apart and send it to the lab, we put ourselves at a big disadvantage, and we may be creating a cadre of individuals who don't know -- don't recall have to do some of the basics that go along with solving crimes.

DOCTOR CROW: Mr. Sanders, do you have some comments on this?

Were you a member of this group?

DARRELL SANDERS: Yes, sir. I defer to the superintendent, if you don't mind.

PARTICIPANT: Smart move.

TERRY HILLARD: In light of what Paul was saying, you know, usually take, for instance, the CPD, the mobile crime lab would go to a scene, and I was telling Chris earlier during the meeting that we have identified four distinct and individual patterns. It seemed as if a serial killer is on the south side of Chicago, and one of the things that we found, and I think since the inception of my coming to this commission as a member here and going back and telling the word that the mobile crime lab are going to have to be a lot more effective and a lot more efficient than what they have been when they come down to processing a crime scene, and we have seen that in light of these four incidents while we have called in the FBI recovery, evidence recovery team, to come in and not only assist our mobile crime lab. Did some nose get bent out of shape? Yes, it did. There was some egos hurt. Yes, there was. But the bottom line is we must solve the crime. We don't care who solves it, as long as it gets solved.

And I think going back to what Paul is saying is the mobile crime lab would come in and probably process a crime scene in two or three hours, and away they went. Well, if you bring in the FBI evidence and evidence recovery team in there, they came in approximately eight o'clock one night, and they left at three o'clock the next morning. Then they returned again at 10 o'clock and left at 4:00. And you talk of the vast amount of evidence that they recovered, it was astounding. And I think that is one of the ways that when it comes down to having the mobile crime labs, not only inadequate detectives, but seeing what the people from Paul's side of the thing, from the crime labs, what they do, and it's going to help us. It's going to enhance our operation and make us operate a lot more efficient and a lot more effective when it comes down to processing a crime scene in a lot of these cases that we are trying to solve.

TERRY GAINER: I'm sorry. I was just going to add that it also is going to be a very -- I'm sorry.

DARRELL SANDERS: That's all right. You outrank me, too.

(Laughter.)

TERRY GAINER: No. It adds a tremendous cost, too, to this. I mean there is no doubt about it. When we start processing every crime scene over these what could be days, there is definitely a cost to the system.

I recall just over a year ago when the Metropolitan Police Department, along with the FBI processed the crime scene at the Capitol shootings, I don't have the number, the days in front of me, but I think we tied that scene up for, I think, four days and worked it for about 20 hours a day between the two of us. And at some point given that the number of homicides everybody has, let alone the sexual assault cases, shootings or stabbings, whether it's the expectation of the courts or the public, or the defense bar, or the police, we are going to bind the system up a little bit on these things.

Again, I don't know where that goes. A lot of police chiefs talk about -- I think it came to our greatest attention during the infamous trial of Simpson, and I think most police chiefs, I think sat back and said, probably anybody on a given day could have been caught up with hopefully not as some of the outlandish blunders that were happening, but the fact that few were processing crime scenes the way the public has suddenly come to expect all these crime scenes to be processed. So I think those days anymore when one and two hours of processing even a murder scene is over, but heaven forbid, I just don't know how we are going to accommodate in jurisdictions where you have two or 300 murders where you could stay on a scene for a day or two to process a crime scene. And then again, what the heck the lab is going to do with all the material you can bring in.

TERRY HILLARD: Well, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that is going to happen on any and every and every crime scene, especially homicides when we had 700 last year, Lord help us, but I think the next thing of what I'm saying is that we have to get more efficient and more effective at the way we do business, you know; and in order to do that, you have to push the money part of it out of it. You know, you are talking about people's lives here, and I don't agree with Barry all the time, you know, but when you are talking about people's lives, whether you are going to prove that they are innocent or they are guilty, you know, we have to do our job a lot better than what we have been doing it in the past, you know, and you have to realize that, and that can't happen if we process those crime scenes the way they historically did.

TERRY GAINER: I did ask the chief if I could make one more comment, because he is waiting, and he gave me permission to do that. The issue will soon become though for us whether we are going to cherry pick on which crime scenes deserve this VIP crime scene processing and which don't, and I know none of us are saying that, but again given the sheer number, at some point, not dissimilar, I guess, than the small conversations that came up about the search for Mr. and Mrs. Kennedy and the sister-in-law that is there going to be -- should there be an expectation that every crime scene is handled the same for everybody that there is not one where you call the FBI in for one, or you tie up the crime scene at the Capitol, as we did, for four days or not. I mean it might be a whole different debate.

TERRY HILLARD: Terry, I think what I am looking at, I am looking at four distinct serial killers operating in a neighborhood that has been devastated probably in the last 17 months, one with Ryan Harris, the Ryan Harris case, and one where you have close to about 178, 188 convicted registered sex offenders living in an area bounded by ten -- about 40 blocks, 40 square blocks, you know. The human outcry from the public states that these individuals have to be -- we have to identify them, locate them and bring them to justice. And yet the human outcry is so high right now that we have to bring in the FBI, and we have to methodically let them process that crime scene and try and bring these cases to a closure.

DARRELL SANDERS: Chief, I know you are outranked, but you still have a right to speak.

JEFFREY THOMA: But they have covered everything so thoroughly. The only two things I want to remind you that we had lengthy discussions about the fact that we may process and we may collect all that evidence that we are certainly not going to submit it all to the labs, because we would clog it. We would clog it instantly. And our recommendation was going to be to the police agencies that they work with the local labs to develop policies so that you could prioritize what you are going to do and you are not going to do.

And in further to what both Terrys said, I think that the expectation of the general public, because I still think that the vast majority of people live outside our large urban areas, and that they are not affected by a homicide like they are in the large cities, and burglary or property crimes against them are what they are victims more often than that; and as they discover and understand the capabilities of this DNA stuff, they are going to expect small agencies like myself and rural agencies to start to collect that stuff on things other than on those most serious cases. So I think that was one of the things that we talked about with why the back case log is going to be such a problem, and that even if, even if we were successful, because you know my position has long been and still is that I don't want to be in a position where I have got to look at a family member and say, We didn't process this thing so, therefore, this person was able -- this perpetrator was able to go free and commit another crime. I don't want us to be in that position, but even if we were to get authorization to do it, listen to the lab group, it takes four or five years just to get everybody up, staff trained and running to be able to handle the backlog. So I do think it's a monumental problem. I do think that it is something that we have to be very conscious of and that we have to speak very cautiously about when we speak to the issue, because I'm telling you, it's coming. The more people understand it, and I am like Superintendent Hillard. I believe that I provide service to the people in my community; and if there is a technology there that is going to be able to fit in my community, then by God I want the opportunity to be able to utilize it, and that is what I intend to do.

JUSTICE REINSTEIN: Yeah, Doctor Crow, the last meeting we had you gave a report from the R and D group, and we talked a little bit about the briefcase kit, the DNA on a chip; and then after that Robin sent a couple of articles, one I think from the Washington Post and one from Popular Science, and it got me to thinking at the time, and now that Terry gives his report is this going to cause more problems for you when you have this technology and you have this briefcase kit. You know, in Chicago, you have a mobile unit, and probably you have individual people who go to these major crime scenes, who are going to be able to utilize this. I guess in the Washington Post it said, they are what, three years away. You know, you were talking about within five years. Now, they are pushing it up, and if you look at the The Human Genome Project, originally they said 2005. Now they are down to next March.

DOCTOR CROW: What they really did was change their standards so that they could meet it sooner.

JUSTICE REINSTEIN: But we are talking about, you know, the future of DNA evidence, and I am wondering you know, in Chief Sanders' jurisdiction, if you have this briefcase kit, is this going to create more problems for the individual lost in the street, do you just ignore it, even though you have it, you know, to do something faster and quicker. Just there were a lot of thoughts that I had in the last couple of weeks after I got that. But I don't know whether you all have discussed that, about if you have that in the next three, four years, the capability to do something right at the scene.

DOCTOR CROW: I have two mixed feelings about that. One is that these are undoubtedly exaggerated by the people who have something to gain by promoting that of course; but on the other hand, almost always our expectations of future scientific and technical advancements have been -- they have come faster than we have expected.

DOCTOR REILLY: But the rate limiting step is probably not the technology, as we have seen here.

DOCTOR CROW: Yeah.

DOCTOR REILLY: It's the politics, the economics, the nature of the system. I, for one, am not a bit worried about this problem in the next five years, Judge.

JUSTICE REINSTEIN: Really?

DOCTOR REILLY: Yeah. I am sure we will have a demonstrable chip that can do these kinds of things. Paul Matsurad, I might add, is working on that, but I think it will be in the field across thousands of police departments I think is very unlikely in the next five years.

DOCTOR CROW: I suppose you get a lot of testing in medical circles before this. I don't know. It's not exactly the same techniques.

DOCTOR REILLY: Even in medical circles, the reality of DNA testing compared to the discussions you see among scientists and the media, there is a huge gap. There is very little DNA-based testing on a day-to-day basis in the United States. Very little.

BARRY SCHECK: But the -- one of the things that I was most pleased at, and I apologize for being unable to attend the last meeting, but the recommendation that this committee came out with on not -- on not taking DNA from people from arrest, not for constitutional reasons, but for the practical reasons, I mean this group, because we have been studying the problem is very, very clear. It is the testing of new, unsolved samples, as they do in Britain, within seven to ten days expeditiously is the most important capacity that we can achieve in the system.

JUSTICE REINSTEIN: With the lethargic response that Commissioner Safir was quoted as saying?

BARRY SCHECK: I mean, you know, listen guys, I am carrying the ball for you on Geraldo.

(Laughter.)

BARRY SCHECK: Go get the transcript. I mean go get the transcript last week.

PARTICIPANT: It's a dirty thankless job.

BARRY SCHECK: I mean -- and it is. But, you know, it is quite -- I mean we have to speak. That recommendation is very important, because we know that the capacity to give the labs and the police the opportunity to test unsolved crimes within seven to ten days, the way they do in Britain, and get that capacity into the system is a huge investment, and it will do more toeliminate the guilty -- or the innocent from being picked up and to get the guilty. And you can't emphasize that enough. And, of course, it entails, in order to prevent these backlogs, a certain kind of strategic training. It can't just be people that do extractions. It has got to be criminalists, people that know how to evaluate crime scenes for this kind of evidence and not necessarily take everything, right, but what is important. You need an expertise here where you can look at blood splatter patterns and have an idea, I will take this one because it's victim blood, and I will take this one because it's possibly perpetrator blood. You know, you need to have that.

I mean we are in Boston. The other day they took -- somebody was in jail for what five months on a bitemark case where they finally tested the saliva swabbing on the bite mark that matched, and they let him go. I mean the backlogs are extraordinary. I think we need academic institutions, incidentally, that will help train people, give certificates and degrees, people who can mesh the scientific background and law enforcement who can go back to the various different police departments and help in the training. It would be one thing that we could do.

One of the most amazing statistics, and I hope Ms. Fereday has the slide, because I saw it the other day from one of her colleagues. In the U.K. when you are evaluating your police departments on success in using the DNA testing, you have got a great scatter plot that shows that the police departments that are best trained in collecting the evidence are having the highest rate of success in solving crime. A really, really clear pattern. And it's that, you know, seven to ten days turnaround and the training. It has to be strategic thinking, and the single greatest issue, just to tell you about that Geraldo, here is Howard Saefer, the police commissioner. He says, oh, thank you, Barry, for telling me to go test the unsolved rape kits, but, you know, the problem with all of you federal bureaucrats -- that is what he called this commission -- all you federal bureaucrats is that you're not going to be for typing everybody at arrest. You just won't cut through things, right? The American people want you to cut through things. And so, you know, there can be -- and, you know, he is sincere about it. I don't want to call him a demagog, but I think people will demagog this issue by saying, Let's test everybody at arrest. That is the most important thing, when we all know from a law enforcement point of view, the most important thing is building the capacity to test samples within seven to ten days. That is the most important.

DOCTOR CROW: We are going to this appropriate group tomorrow afternoon.

There is somebody just behind you, Barry, who has been trying to speak for what did I say, the last ten minutes? Yes.

JOE VOLLARO: It hasn't been that long. I just wanted to make a quick comment, because Barry just actually mentioned the first thing I was going to say, which is I think as DNA moves forward, it becomes more important with the criminalistics aspect of processing crime scenes. So that has already been said, but the other point goes back to the crime scene chips and of the crime scene. And I guess Barry also said this, but I don't know that it is truly necessarily that important to be able to do something at a crime scene. There are a lot of limitations of that. First of all, speaking from the standpoint of somebody who processes crime scenes, as well as does DNA typing in the lab, I think it's a particular discipline that is better done in the laboratory, notin the crime scene in the field.

The second point is, at least as far as Boston goes, the majority of cases that we have to do DNA testing on is sexual assault, so we are certainly not going to march into the hospital and collect semen evidence from a victim and test it there, because that is where most of that evidence comes from.

The third point is we are also limited in some way about if we test the sample, and we consume the sample. So then I don't know, does that decision-making have to go to the crime scene, also?

So I think there are a myriad of different reasons why that idea isn't very sound, and I think that expeditious testing in a matter of days or a week or so, as Barry just said and other people have said, is a much more important standard than being able to carry something in your pants pocket to a crime scene to process something in about five minutes.

DOCTOR CROW: Thank you very much. Say, for the record though, do you want to tell what your name is so she has it.

JOE VOLLARO: Yes. My name is Joe Vollaro, and I am the senior criminalist at the Boston Police Crime Lab.

PAUL FERRARA: I would like to second that emotion.

PARTICIPANT: Would you like to sing it, too?

PAUL FERRARA: What we have to realize is that I would suspect that more than half of the biological evidence that we encounter at crime scenes, and they are, of course, submitted to laboratory involve mixtures. You alluded to it, vaginal swabs. Well, inherently, you have a mixture. So a field test, any sort of technology on a chip while I think it has great potential in terms of laboratory -- throughput in a laboratory, one has to recognize that the most time-consuming portions of the DNA analysis precede the actual beginning of the analysis, the differential extraction, or isolation and extraction, and the complex interpretation after the analysis is complete. So that there is no -- not going to be any panacea in that regard. So I -- I agree completely.

GEORGE CLARKE: Yeah, actually, I would like to return to what Terry brought up some time ago about what's driving forensic testing; in other words, who are the laboratories working for, and I think you identified that obviously for years it has been, frankly, for preparing cases for trial for we as prosecutors.

There is a limited amount of testing that goes on to solve the case. Most of the time none, but some of the time that is required to solve it. So it's obviously preparing those cases for trial, and then who is driving that are the 12 people who sit in the jury box, you know, as they become more inquisitive, for lack of a better term, and they start expecting answers to scientific questions that they themselves may be the people who are individually raising, then we have to be concerned about answering those questions. We may very well have five items of evidence in a case typed for its DNA content, knowing full well what the answer is but being able or being -- that is wanting be to in the position of telling the jurors not just what the answer is, but we did it, helping to show that we took every step possible to help exclude this person as the attacker, even though we know what the answer is 99 percent of the time, but we are doing it so that we can present them that we tried our best to exclude this person. I mean we do tests for gunshot residue, which is frequently, as those of you who have dealt with, are very problematic area in terms of demonstrating anything significant, but a lot of the time we do it to show that we did it, fingerprint analysis for comparison and so on.

So it comes down to with all of those demands, what are we doing? We have to prioritize. That is a substantial portion of what I do in my office now is literally not separate people from fights, but when ten prosecutors want a test done, and only five of them get it, then you have to sit down and talk about their cases, how important it is, and, you know, at least at times have to say no, you don't get to have it, and we will pay the consequences if we lose. So that is the unfortunate reality of what goes on now and in an ideal world.

Barry is absolutely right, we would get this testing done in unsolved cases, all cases within a week. I mean that would be wonderful, but it doesn't, I think, fit the reality of today and, unfortunately, the near future.

DOCTOR CROW: Is there somebody around the perimeter of the room would that would like to say something on this issue?

If not, I would want to push ahead, because we want to hear from -- unless you -- excuse me.

CHRISTOPHER ASPLEN: Can I just ask if we have a consensus on that issue?

DOCTOR CROW: Go ahead.

CHRISTOPHER ASPLEN: Let me ask this: Is there a consensus that that kind of recommendation kind of resonates with this group and is worth putting in writing? Again, talking about DNA as an example, the need to kind of recommit ourselves to law enforcement training and education and resources in technology in general and recommend to the Attorney General that she do something, be it a commission, a summit, something like that that allows her to look at those technology issues and how law enforcement gets trained and educated and how they are empowered to use technology.

Is that something that is worth it for us to work on in a working group perhaps to bring back to this commission?

JEFFREY THOMA: In wording it, as we did in the working group, appreciating already the known desire of law enforcement to use their best efforts, I know you'll phrase it properly, but I think the concern --

CHRISTOPHER ASPLEN: I don't think Chief Sanders is going to let me get away with anything other than that.

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