Baltimore County police can spend more money to finish out a five-year contract, outsourcing part of its DNA testing to two private companies, the County Council agreed Monday.
With a shortage of staff in its forensics department limiting its ability to do all the necessary DNA testing in-house, the department has for several years outsourced some of that work.
The county originally gave the department $497,440 for the work. That figure jumped Monday by about 141 percent, to $1.2 million for contracts set to expire in 2008.
The county submitted last year 125 cases for forensics analysis ? police spokesman Bill Toohey couldn?t say how many of those were then outsourced ? and had testing done on 88 of them, he said.
“DNA has just become an essential tool of law enforcement investigations,” Toohey said, likening testing of DNA samples to “what fingerprints were 20 or 30 years ago ? just routine parts of the investigation.”
At a cost of $700 per sample of blood and saliva and $950 for hair, DNA analyses can be costly.
The police department tends to do the testing in-house on samples for which it needs urgent results, perhaps for a trial or to help a critical investigation, Toohey said.
For older cases where there?s less of a rush, he said, “we might farm it out.”
When those cases make it over to the courthouse, the DNA samples are critical, said deputy State?s Attorney Steve Bailey.
“It?s really important now,” Bailey said of the funding increase, “because the police department is dealing with personnel issues and hiring issues to get their biology unit fully staffed … until that takes place, they have to outsource.”
