It?s a far cry from a sexy “CSI” episode, but Gov. Robert Ehrlich Thursday signed an executive order to set up permanent board to help Maryland crime labs collaborate and improve services.
“It just seemed that the time was right to give it an official status statewide,” said Ehrlich policy chief Joseph Getty. As a member of the House of Delegates, Getty had sponsored the legislation setting up a task force six years ago to examine the issues facing crime scene investigators.
“This was before the CSIs,” Getty said, “but we all knew that this was the cutting edge of law enforcement.”
Key issues facing the eight major crime labs in Maryland are financing for modern equipment, retention and training of staff and national accreditation. Accreditation is an issue that defense attorneys raise when investigators testify, according toGreg Shipley, the spokesman for the State Police, which runs the state?s largest crime lab with the widest range of services. It did investigations for 46 police departments last year.
Equipment is less of an issue for state police since the agency opened its new 68,000-square-foot crime lab. But keeping up with new technology is “certainly something that every crime lab experiences,” Shipley said.
“We actually have robotic equipment in our DNA lab that allows us to use a different type of testing,” Shipley said.
State Medical Examiner David Fowler served on the original task force and said it had continued to meet informally after it issued its report in 2001. “We were continuing to work in the background,” Fowler said. He?s “absolutely delighted” that it is being made permanent.
Recruiting and retaining technical staff is a troublesome issue for Maryland agencies because “we are close to the federal government,” which generally pays better, Fowler said. “They tend to poach people from Virginia and Maryland. We find ourselves constantly training people.”
