Results tagged “fingerprint”

After an LA Times headline like this--"LAPD's fingerprint lab isn't up to the task"--the best response is for the LAPD to start briefing city council members in a public meeting weekly about the fingerprint unit. And that's what the understaffed office is starting to do. It was found last month, via a confidential report obtained by the Times, that the Fingerprint Analysis Unit is woefully understaffed for the amount of work created by crimes and is sometimes too lax with evidence--some has been lost and at least two have been arrested falsely after sloppy work leading to a lawsuit, possibly a class action one. At about the same time this controversy hit the presses, City Controller Laura Chick announced the "disturbing" backlog of 7,000 rape-kits.

Oops! The LA Times got their hands on an LAPD confidential report that admits people were wrongly charged with crimes because fingerprint specialists apparently didn't have those specialized skills. Rhonda Sims-Lewis, chief of the LAPD's administrative and technical bureau and others "described a poorly run operation, in which records and evidence were left lying around or misplaced, and supervisors 'were stuck in the old way of doing things.' Pressed to explain the sloppy work of the unit, Yvette Sanchez-Owens, commanding officer of the Scientific Investigation Division, speculated that 'people were reviewing the work of friends and just rubber stamping it without really reviewing it.'" One analyst was fired and another three were suspended.