The City of Baltimore has agreed to take on D.C.’s monstrous DNA backlog, police officials said.
Details still are being worked out, but Baltimore has agreed in principle that its Police Crime Laboratory will begin testing 20 cases per month until D.C.’s federal grant money runs out, said D.C. police Comm. Christopher M. LoJacono.
It is a rare bit of good news for D.C.’s troubled forensics program, which has been plagued by high staff turnover, long delays and wasted opportunities as the District tries to modernize and build its own DNA lab.
“Any step forward is welcome,” said District Council Member Kathy Patterson, D-Ward 3, who has championed the cause of a DNA lab for years. “It’s good news, definitely.”
The District has obtained nearly $1 million in federal grants to test DNA from thousands of unsolved rapes and homicides. The District will pay Baltimore from those grants.
LoJacono says that depending on its own caseload, Baltimore might test even more D.C. cases every month.
“It’ll get these cases resolved one way or another,” LoJacono said this week.
The two cities have been negotiating this arrangement since March. Under the deal, the Baltimore lab will also review results from samples of 100 unsolved rapes tested by Bode Technology Group earlier this year.
Bode, which lost a government contract last year when Illinois said it found a huge error rate, obtained about $60,000 from D.C. to test the samples. Because it is a private laboratory, Bode can’t access the FBI’s national database. Public labs like Baltimore, however, can access that information, making it much more likely to find a match.
LoJacono said that the Bode samples have not produced any evidence of serial offenders and not produced any “cold hits” of known offenders in D.C., but hopes that Baltimore will have checked results against the FBI database by the end of the summer.
