DOCTOR CROW: Okay. I want to make sure we have time to hear the three people that we have as guests, and that they have their full speaking opportunity.

So you arranged for it. You introduce them.

CHRISTOPHER ASPLEN: I will introduce them. And let me just point out that although you may think that there is very little method to my madness at times, the whole issue of, I think Paul first mentioned, the whole first issue of evidence storage issues in the context of our increasing use of DNA, well, lo and behold, the next thing on your agenda is the issue of evidence storage.

The way that Mr. Peterson, Mr. Matheson and Ms. Foster came to the commission's attention, quite frankly, is a result of their own interest in this particular issue.

What happened was, I was at the office, and I got a phone call from Detective Foster asking me whether or not the commission had discussed this issue, decided anything, made any recommendations on the issue of evidence storage. And while we anticipated doing that, we recognize as an issue, we would, in fact, do that in the future, and we offered to the LAPD to come and talk to us about their particular experience, the issues that they are facing so that we could kind of use their experience along with the experience of the law enforcement already on the commission to analyze this issue even further. So we appreciate their being here. We know that when the first phone call was made that it was not anticipated that they would be involved in the process, but we do appreciate their involvement.

Just briefly, David Peterson is the commanding officer of the property division of the LAPD. He is a former US Naval officer, 28-year veteran of the police department. He has worked in the office of city administration -- an administrative officer of public works and recreation and parks departments. He is a graduate of California State University. The division that he commands, the property division, is an all civilian command, 95 property officers assigned to 19 property rooms and stations throughout LA. The division is responsible for booking, storage, security, chain of custody and disposition of the property and evidence items contained in the 330,000 yearly bookings of the LAPD. The rest of the bio is included in your materials.

Greg Matheson earned his BS in criminalistics from California State University at Long Beach and has been a criminalist with the LAPD since 1978. He is currently the assistant laboratory director of the Department's forensic analysis session. He is detailed to manage serology, DNA, firearms, trace analysis, question documents and field operations. Prior to that he was a unit supervisor for the Department's serology DNA section.

It was really at LAPD's suggestion that we include someone from the property division for the LAPD and somebody from the laboratory division in the same discussion and then also that we include Detective Foster, who is currently the detective supervisor from LAPD as a kind of person closer to the street, if you will, involved in the more direct issues. She is -- Detective Foster conducts detective case management and preparation, training at basic detective schools and major assault crime schools in addition to conducting staff research with the investigative analysis section. Again, the rest of the history is contained on the bios that you have.

And I'll get out of everybody's way.

David Peterson DAVID PETERSON: Okay. Thank you, Chris. It's a real pleasure to be here in Boston. Many of us from California saw more rain in the last afternoon than we saw the whole season last year. It's a very refreshing change and a very nice place to have this meeting. We certainly appreciate being included here. We are here as much to learn as to tell you about our experience in Los Angeles. In 1983, like many law -- or prior to 1983, like many law enforcement agencies, we did not have a frozen evidence storage capacity in Los Angeles. It was at that time that we put our first freezer in in the property room at Parker Center, our headquarters police building. That lasted until about 1988 when we put another brand-new permanently fixed freezer in our new criminalists lab in our technical center, which is approximately eight blocks from Parker Center and houses our crime lab.

It wasn't long before we filled that one up, too. About three years later, we added, as a temporary measure, a 40-foot-freezer trailer that we rented from a local company. That lasted about another two years.

Needless to say, this story goes on and on, and we are now at a current rate of accumulating frozen evidence storage where we have to rent a new 40-foot-mobile-freezer trailer about every six months. There is a cost to that. The cost itself is not of particular significance, but it's the space and the logistics to hook up the electricity for it, and the ever growing nature of the evidence that we were concerned about.

In Los Angeles, I think we are a little bit unique from many of the agencies here in that we are a full-service agency. We are the custodian of the property. We are the crime lab. We are the detective agency. In order to deal with this problem, the task force was put together within our department, and Detective Foster was tasked with being the chief staff person to that.

We got some information together to try to deal with this primarily from the storage standpoint, but also from all of the perspectives that have been discussed here today. We realize that this is only one part of a much bigger picture.

Detective Foster has some real interesting statistics on what we do store, how we store it and where we are going in the way of making decisions on what to do about this in the future. So take it.

Maria Foster MARIA FOSTER: Props. The only reason I got this assignment is because I have got to write the report; and also because I am assigned to it, I am assuming I have to get promoted to investigative analysis section, who does the back room. We do the research for the officers and the chief of police. That being said, I wanted to just say I used to think I was a pretty good detective, and I was. The minute I saw Mr. Scheck in action, let me tell you, I am one hell of a better detective, because now I leave no stone unturned. Whenever I say something, I make sure I can back it up with everything. So here it is. (Laughter.) (Applause.)

MARIA FOSTER: Okay. These -- we did an audit of all our research evidence, and these are the -- I brought them, because you just have to look at this. These are all the frozen items that were booked on or before 1983, okay.

PARTICIPANT: How many cases per page are those?

MARIA FOSTER: It varies. It varies. Some of them I just have three or four items; and some of the report numbers will have 20 items, and there is no way of knowing. This is just frozen evidence. And these are all crimes that are not rapes and not homicides for 1983 to 1993. See the difference there.

Okay. I'll pick these up in a second.

These are all our rapes from 1983 to '93. The pile is growing. And these are all our homicides from '83 to '93. So that is our problem right there.

Our problem is that right now we have completely run out of room, and we have to keep everything. The Los Angeles Police Department, I found out, doesn't dispose of anything that is in the freezer. We haven't -- well, we never just got around to needing to get rid of anything, and everything is still in appeals, or we are afraid that it might go to appeals, and there have been so many changes in our chief of police and our chief of police and our chief of police that no one has gotten around to actually addressing the issue until now that we have completely run out of space.

So we had approximately 9,782 homicides between '83 and '93, which is what this pile is. And since then, since '93 to the present, we have got another pile that equals this. Okay. Now it's about 10,000. About 10,000. It will be easier to work with that.

PARTICIPANT: Ten thousand homicides?

MARIA FOSTER: For '83 to '93, that have frozen evidence. Okay. That is not how many homicides we have, because some don't have frozen evidence, and I didn't even go into addressing that. This is just the ones that we have for frozen evidence. And I see notes being taken. I'm so glad about this part. So about 6,700. Our clearance rate is about 67 to 68 percent, all of which were cleared by arrest. Some are cleared for reasons beyond our control, but mostly they were cleared by arrest. So that means we have about 3,100, 3,200 that were unsolved; and of course, because there is no statute of limitation on unsolved, we are supposed to keep those forever.

Okay. Well, that is all good and fine, but now we are dealing with those conviction issues here. If we are supposed to keep the unsolved matters, because we haven't solved them, then now we are supposed to keep the other stuff pretty much forever, because there is going to be an appeal process.

Well, then the question to this commission is: Where does our department draw the line? When do we say, okay, five years is enough? Ten years is enough? Fifteen years is enough? Now it can go in an air-conditioned room, and it can go on shelf storage.

I haven't answered that question. And this meeting frankly has changed my whole perspective on this report. When I found out that there were certain states in the nation that were not freezing their DNA evidence, or they were only freezing it until analysis and then putting it in an air-conditioned room, I said, great, let's join the bandwagon and go with that. But as we did a little more research, then I found out that some of the states that are not doing that are having a lot of postconviction overturnings. And then of course there is the moral dilemma of what if he is an innocent man, and what if there is another stain on the sheet, or what have you. What is the representative sample? Nobody knows what it is, because the powers to be, you guys, haven't drawn the line there, and the scientists need to tell us. And that is where I come in. I'm just a cop. So somebody has got to tell me, yes, it's okay to just do one stain, or you have to do all ten, or no, you have to do all 25. And if you will draw the line for us then I can make some kind of a protocol for our department.

My original recommendation was let's just go for, for example, sexual assaults. The statute of limitations is six years. Let's hold it six years, give it one more so that we can make sure that we can get it into CODIS. Okay. Well, now, I can't do that, because -- or I can't make that recommendation with a clear conscience, because what if seven years from now, even if it is in CODIS, we got rid of all this evidence, and all we have got is the DNA extracts so the information that is in CODIS, now what do we do?

Okay. So I have some real issues, and I'm at an impasse, because I don't know what to do, and I don't what kind of recommendation to make for my chief, and believe me, he wants one.

And jump in here any time, guys. Okay. The premise of seven to ten days, oh, please, I wish we could. The Los Angeles Police Department, right now, if you didn't have a suspect in custody and a court date, that thing is not going to get analyzed, whatever it is. It is not going to happen. Okay. So now if you have got a suspect that is in custody, now you have taken second priority. And when you got a court date, when you go to trial, then it will happen.

And so the unsolves, nothing is happening there. So if you have an unsolved sexual assault that is going to go the six years plus the one that I was thinking of, that evidence might get destroyed in good faith, because we can't catch up, because our criminals can't catch -- we have got 11 people in there. That is it. There is no more room to put another desk. So now what? And, again, I don't come to you with any answers. I come to you with this and a whole bunch of question marks, and that is where we are.

Sir.

Greg Matheson GREG MATHESON: Actually, I originally came into this, and like Mr. Peterson had said, back in 1983 when we got our first freezer. It was in response to a nation decision. Back then, you know, DNA was not a consideration when it came to forensic work, and we were dealing with enzymes, and the reality is we still do some cases by enzyme work. We have not completely abandoned a couple of the markers. We did jump on early, and we started freezing anything that had biological evidence associated with it. We were doing no sort of triaging when it came to it. If an item came in with the custody of the police department through a detective through an officer through the coroner's office, if it had biological evidence on it, it went in the freezer. It answered a number of questions. Number one: Do we even know if the biological evidence is evidence at that point, or is it just an item that is on? We didn't have to make that decision. We threw it in the freezer. In the case of other coroners evidence that came to us, we never had to decide whether or not the biology on it was the evidence, because if it came from the coroner's office, it probably smells a little bit, and the property doesn't want their place stinking up. Throw it in the freezer. It doesn't stink. For years that was the philosophy. Anything and everything that had any form of biological evidence got thrown into one of our freezers.

As you heard, we built one. We built another one. We started renting freezer trucks. The advent of DNA came along. We saw, you know, RFLP. You still need to maintain that evidence, because it does degrade, and it will degrade down to the point where you won't get a result.

PCR, you can get a little bit of information out of it. Let's just keep on freezing everything. It still hasn't answered the question.

STRs are coming along, and all of a sudden now the Department came to the laboratory and said, hey, we hear this stuff is great. You don't have to worry about degradation. All we need is a little tiny sample. Can't we quit buying freezers, and about a year and a half ago they came to the laboratory and wanted a scientific answer to the storage problem that we were having. In other words, they wanted the lab to come back and say, You are right. This stuff is great. Don't bother freezing it anymore. Throw it on a shelf.

Personally, I wasn't willing to do that. I was looking at the research that was out there. Yes, the amount of evidence, as you all know, that you need to get a good STR result is extremely small, and I'll be happy to tell anybody that comes to the lab here, it says, odds are 99.9 or higher percentages of the cases that come into our custody could be taken, stored on a shelf, and we will give you a STR date, you know, ten years from now, 15 years, 20 years from now, some of it because that is just when we are getting around to it, but as an illustration, it should still be good.

My concern is forensic evidence, as you all know, it is not pristine. It isn't something that is going to fall on a nice clean piece of ceramic, or something like that dried media that would be collected and placed on a shelf and stored dry, which will last decades, hundreds of years, who knows. A lot of times though the evidence is laying on a piece of concrete that has dirt in it, that has chemicals in it. It's going to start the degradation process. We may not get it for a couple of days. The crime may not even be discovered for a week, or a month or a year, of whatever. By the time we get some of this evidence, the DNA has degraded to the point where, yes, you can get a result today, but what happens if you throw it on the shelf, and there is a slight degradation that is going on, or else you pick up some agents, chemical, biological along with that blood that does keep that degradation process going; what if the officer hasn't gotten this training that we were talking about a few minutes ago, and he doesn't dry it right; or it's all in clotting, it isn't recognized as being biological, gets folded up, thrown into a paper bag or a plastic bag, oh, my God, and thrown on a shelf somewhere, the degradation is going to occur, and we can't give you results down the road.

So I am not willing to tell the department, no problem, go ahead and take everything we have in the freezer and throw it on the shelf. So they are not getting an answer from us is basically what I'm coming down and saying. I'm not going to give that to him.

A little bit of background on our unit. As was previously mentioned, we do DNA analysis on cases that are going to court period. I have got three DNA analysts for the city. At the moment a fourth is going to go on line in a month, and hopefully a couple more that may go on line within the next year, but that is where we are at.

To make up the difference, we send out a lot of our evidence. Our main contractor is Cellmark Diagnostics (phonetic spelling) in Maryland, and they are currently backlogged. The best that we can get out of them right now without paying a lot of extra money is two to three months on a PCR return, and a lot of times that is not acceptable for the turnaround time that we need.

In-house, we are running a backlog once a case is determined to be a priority one, or going to court, of somewhere around a month to six weeks. That is once we know that it's absolutely needed. Backlog currently sits at about 200 cases that are waiting to be done, and the detectives are self-regulating themselves and not requesting things that they know will never get done. So there is a whole batch of unanalyzed cases out there. It's also a good point to point out that the crime rate has gone down considerably, and I am sure you all are aware of that. The City of Los Angeles, we hit a high, I think in the early '80s of pushing 1,200 homicides in one year. In 1998, I think we didn't break 600. I think we were in the 500 range. You know, that is great.

Requests for analysis within our laboratory, particularly in the serology and DNA unit, haven't gone at all. As a matter of fact, they have gone up. What that tells me is that we have never come close to providing the service the department needs for DNA analysis; that we are still somewhere not even, you know, the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the service that we could be providing.

Like I mentioned, our philosophy right now is that if we can get into a freezer, regardless of the condition of the evidence when it's collected, the clock stops at that point. We don't want to be in a position to say, fine, put it on a shelf and maybe have to sit on the stand and answer questions as to why there aren't any results that are obtained from this evidence.

And that was pretty much everything I have. And we are trying to work with the Department, trying to solve the issues. Along with, I would like to mention we are in a little bit of a different situation in that we are compartmentalized. The laboratory no longer has any control or responsibility to maintain evidence at all. That goes to our property division, but it's still within the department. We don't have an agency once we are done to ship it back to. The responsibility for the collection, storage, analysis and retention afterwards falls solely within the one jurisdiction. And you might think that that would simplify things, because the call comes under one head, but it also doesn't allow us to put heated responsibility back on anybody else.

Yeah.

PAUL FERRARA: Greg, if I am not correct, you could serve a population of over 8 million or that nature? What is the --

GREG MATHESON: Actually, the city -- if you don't know how it works, I mean the City of Los Angeles has a crime lab, which I am part of, and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department has one. We serve strictly the City of Los Angeles, population of about -- I think it is three and a half million, or something like that. The county is roughly the same. The reality is we have more of the crime in the county than they do, but we handle about three and a half million.

PAUL FERRARA: Did I understand you to say three examiners? Do you have three examiners?

GREG MATHESON: We have three criminalists that can do DNA analysis, that is correct. I have 11 people in my serology unit, three that do DNA, one analyst that is going to be starting shortly. The remainder of them are capable of doing the screens, capable of doing some conventional work, or some are capable of doing extractions, passing it on to the other people to do the analysis, and we are slowly trying to bring everybody back up, but when you are dealing with the number of cases that they have, that darn casework just keeps getting in the way of bringing people on line in the new techniques.

PAUL FERRARA: I am in a population of, a less hostile population in Virginia, I would like to think, although we are about six million or six and a half million. I have got 22 DNA examiners now. This is all STRs, and I can't keep up. You know, you are right. I mean obviously, that is the course.

GREG MATHESON: We don't.

PAUL FERRARA: Have you considered at all -- one of the things we do is when the perk kits and crime scene evidence come in, even though we can't get to actually perform an examination, we open them up within ten days and air dry them so that we can, you know, take the like liquid blood, put them on FTA cards, let it air dry so that we can store the perk kits at least at room temperature, and we are picking up perk kits 20 years old right now, and they are fine with the STR, which are great.

Admittedly, though, some evidence you have just got to put in a refrigerator or freezer.

GREG MATHESON: Actually, we have -- that brings up the old issue of screening evidence to begin with, that we did think about that some jurisdictions around California do that. Again, we don't have the personnel to do it.

PAUL FERRARA: It takes some money to do that.

GREG MATHESON: It takes somebody out to do that. Our concern then, and this is something that has to do with liability when it comes to cases. Are we going to find all the items, all the evidence on the item that is pertinent; if we don't, if there is multiple stains, and you choose to collect five out of the 20 is it going to be the other one that is going to be the probative one for the defense.

PAUL FERRARA: Well, you keep all the stains. You just dry the -- you know, dry the sheet or dry the clothing completely.

GREG MATHESON: And some of it does come down to a matter of turning, because drying is the big issue. I mean if you can get it on the shelf and keep it at a reasonable dry temperature dry, you are going to be able to type that stuff indefinitely.

We have got 10,000 police officers. Pardon me.

MARIA FOSTER: Three years or less experience for the majority.

GREG MATHESON: The majority, yeah, the majority have three years or less of experience. The criminalists, we do not have crime scene techs. The criminalists are the ones that do evidence collection when we are requested by detectives, and that occurs in maybe 10 to 15 percent of the violent crimes in the city. That means the detectives and officers are doing the rest of the collection.

Many times it gets into the property system. The crime lot may or may not see it for four months, six months, a year, who knows.

PAUL FERRARA: The other sad thing, and you alluded to it in the cases gone to court, first priority that all those unsolved cases sitting there with your data bank law and future victims.

GREG MATHESON: Without a doubt. I mean it's frustrating on our part, because we do want to participate in it. That is one thing this group, I noticed, does get very involved in the data bank. We have no association with that other than getting samples in and running it against it, but we don't get involved in the offender data bank at all.

JUSTICE REINSTEIN: Who does that, the state crime lab?

GREG MATHESON: Yes, the State Department of Justice. There are a couple of labs around the state that are better staffed than we are that are contracted to do some within their local jurisdiction, but as a role, the State Department of Justice.

JUSTICE REINSTEIN: California's is RFLP still?

GREG MATHESON: No, they have gone over to STR.

JUSTICE REINSTEIN: Wasn't Jan talking about that, about the backlog when they have to retest?

GREG MATHESON: I think our database has about 40,000 RFLP profiles, and it's just beginning with STR profiles with collected samples, I think, a little over 100,000.

JUSTICE REINSTEIN: So the outsource thing doesn't really -- the recommendations regarding if we are going to outsource really affects the state lab, as opposed your lab?

GREG MATHESON: Right.

DAVID PETERSON: Because of data banking, that is correct.

GREG MATHESON: But like I did mention, we do look for alternate sources when it comes to our evidentiary samples. We don't have the personnel to meet them all, but a lot of those sources are also getting backed up. We recently used another California county crime lab, Santa Clara crime lab, to analyze a case that is 14 years old, and they did that for us, you know.

DOCTOR REILLY: Do you have financial constraints of a serious nature on outsourcing crime scene evidence?

GREG MATHESON: On the analysis --

DOCTOR REILLY: You mentioned you use cell samples.

GREG MATHESON: We are limited, though I have never been told what that limit is. They just start complaining when I start spending too much money. Last year we spent about 130,000 outsourcing analysis on casework. They, approximately a year and a half ago, Cellmark was our second most productive criminalist in the serology unit as far as case output.

Yes, Barry.

BARRY SCHECK: It seems to me that you really do understand the source of your problem. I mean because if you had the resources, and I mean I think collectively it's fair to say we are all kind of amazed at how little they are giving you to work, Rick. I mean, and I know it's not your fault, but this is scandalous, because if you don't have the capacity -- if you have the capacity to evaluate the evidence when it comes in, what you would be able to do, I mean the best of all possible worlds typing before people got to court, to use the technology, but also it would help solve your storage problem, because then you would be able to dry stuff with greater confidence; you would have some DNA extracts, and also going back into your old unsolves, and I personally walked through your freezer system, and it is very impressive.

They have the black dahlia evidence, right? Do you still have that?

DAVID PETERSON: Oh, yeah.

BARRY SCHECK: I have walked through your freezers, and my gosh, you could save a lot of money by expeditiously going through old, unsolved cases.

I have to tell you that I spoke to Mike Jacobs, Woody, the prosecutor in Orange County --

GEORGE CLARKE: Orange County.

BARRY SCHECK: -- who has this tracking program. Are you aware of it? He has gone through old unsolved homicides in Orange County all the way back to 1973, and he has now come up with -- he had something like 3,000 back to '73. I notice, Detective, that you said you had 3,200 unsolves. No?

MARIA FOSTER: Approximately, yes, sir.

BARRY SCHECK: From '83, yeah. And going through those, he then evaluated them, and he now has a list of about 100 cases that he thinks are good candidates for STR typing, which he is going to proceed to do, and I think his phrase was, he told me, he thinks it's the silent epidemic, these unsolved homicides. I absolutely don't understand why. I mean that would also help you solve the storage problem, if you had funding to go through that. If you want, we should issue -- we could issue a recommendation. I'll come and ask for money for you.

GREG MATHESON: One of the reasons we are here is to point out we are not the only department in the world that is operating in conditions like this.

BARRY SCHECK: Well, you did note some circumstances that make you have some expertise now in looking through crime labs across the country and where the evidence is stored; and as for reasons you point out, you are rather unique, because there is not -- even though there is jurisdictional authority in your police department, it is all going to one place.

GREG MATHESON: Correct.

BARRY SCHECK: As opposed to many other crime labs, where they will get the evidence in a case, they will do an initial evaluation, and then they send it back to the police, and they either don't store anything, except what they analyze, and it goes to different places. You have everything.

GREG MATHESON: Right.

BARRY SCHECK: And you are a big place, and you are not analyzing anything. So you put all those things together, and you are in crisis.

GREG MATHESON: Well, you know, I obviously don't disagree with any of the things that you say regarding the condition of our ability to analyze and that type of thing. Our concern at the moment, and the likelihood of them saying, you know, you get another 20 criminalists that do DNA, and here is a wonderful place to put them in the near future is not likely to happen.

One of things we are looking at and concerned about is if we pull stuff out of the freezer, are we going to run into a problem later on in court? Are we going to run into a problem where we are not going to be able to analyze the evidence?

There are suggestions. There is another California agency that puts in the report that they start all frozen until it's analyzed, and then they say this evidence will be removed from the freezer in two years. It's the notice to everybody that the stuff is going to be put out on the shelf; and then if any change occurs after that point, it's not our problem; or they automatically remove stuff from the freezer after five years, because, you know, the chance, the historical chance of solving a case after that wasn't very good. Now it's getting better, and that chance is taken away from us. Or do we even need to freeze anymore? I mean is the technology stuff that it is a concern that we are overly concerned about, but we don't want to take the chance of destroying evidence that has the chance of exonerating somebody down the road, or something along that line?

PAUL FERRARA: Is LAPD and LASO working together and building a single large forensic laboratory, or is that a --

GREG MATHESON: What is currently happening on that is there is state legislation out in California that will provide money for facility funding throughout the state of which there is currently one proposal where we want to take a large chunk of that money that will build a laboratory or a building that will house individually the LA County Sheriff's lab, the Los Angeles police department lab, Cal State, Los Angeles criminalistics program and some state training facilities on Cal State owned property.

PAUL FERRARA: I mean that is some indication on how far you want away from solving your problem. I mean if --

GREG MATHESON: Are you waiting for the state to do something?

PAUL FERRARA: If you usually do something, it will take you three years before that building is up. Then if you get the personnel, it's going to take you a couple years validation and training before you are in a position even approaching what you need.

MICHAEL SMITH: How many 40-foot trucks do you have in three years?

DAVID PETERSON: We have four today. At our rate we are at every six months we have to have another one.

GEORGE CLARKE: Actually, and like our county, both Los Angeles and San Diego had Grand Jury investigations and recommendations that laboratories be consolidated in each of our counties, but so far no money, no action.

JEFFREY THOMA: Isn't yours being consolidated, Woody?

GEORGE CLARKE: No.

GREG MATHESON: I misunderstood.

GEORGE CLARKE: Actually, we together had some concerns about consolidating the two laboratories, because between the two, it would become extremely large. I mean part of the problem would be just the huge size and then the problems associated with that, plus the City of LA does not like and probably should not have to give up autonomy over the work.

BARRY SCHECK: What is the cost? In other words, what is the cost of these new trucks and the storage? I mean I guess what am building towards is there is a certain synergy here. If you were -- what does it cost to go back and evaluate and test an old unsolved case so that you can then dry it versus the cost of buying more trucks and storing them.

DAVID PETERSON: We are going to literally run out of space at some point for the trucks. We literally have to buy land to do that. So we are trying to approach this from as many fronts as we can.

BARRY SCHECK: And there is a Denny's nearby, right? Why don't you just park it on that.

GREG MATHESON: There is a huge frozen storage, commercial frozen storage company not too far from us, and the Department approached them a little while back, and they were concerned about the rest of their food customers and the idea of having bloody evidence around. So they didn't go for that.

CHRISTOPHER ASPLEN: In reference to your point that you wanted to show that you guys aren't the only folks experiencing these problems, along those lines, the commission has asked -- has contracted with the Police Executive Research Forum to conduct a survey of police departments across the country to ask the following questions, generally speaking, and I'm wondering if you happen to know them off the top of your head. What we want to do is just look at rape kits themselves and how many rape kits individual departments have in storage in nonsuspect cases. The theory being one of the things that the commission wants to do is look at that, use that as a base line, given the extent to which those are a reasonable assumption, that if there is a rape kit that there would be DNA testing done, if we could.

Now, in New York City, for example, there is 12,000 that they are outsourcing. Do you have an idea of how many rape kits you have in storage?

DAVID PETERSON: I don't think immediately we can tell you that off the top of our heads. We do have a number.

BARRY SCHECK: Let me get that number, because New York's number is a five-year number. That is over five years, and it's just for the city.

CHRISTOPHER ASPLEN: And, again, it's just -- it's not rape cases. It's just rape kits. It's obviously not every case with biological evidence in it. It is the bare, bare minimum.

DAVID PETERSON: We have a computerized system for keeping track of all of the property that we have, and it's just a matter of running that sort, and we can give you an exact number over any period of time.

CHRISTOPHER ASPLEN: That would be fantastic.

GREG MATHESON: Along with the drop in the ancillary, obviously the rape cases went on down. Over the last ten years, I know from the other end on how many kits we have prepared and we send out for use. Obviously, some of those are going to get trashed, and some of them are going to get lost, but for quite awhile there we were consuming between 1,200 and 1,600 a year, and that has dropped down to between six and 800 in the last couple of years at this point so --

BARRY SCHECK: If you wanted to make one proposal, I would -- along these lines, I would do this. I would go to Governor Davis -- who is the mayor? Oh, he is a reasonable guy, and say, look, this is what we want the money for. We can identify for you rapes and rape homicides, and we know that rape and rape homicides, if you do testing on those, because semen is going to be leading to the identity of the suspect, that that is the best case to test. We want money to do all of those as a way into our storage problem and money to train people to do those. It is also what the British teach us is their greatest success are solving these kinds of crimes, particularly when they involve strangers. That is when the technology succeeds the most.

Thirdly, they are going to be the best preserved, all right, in terms of the stains. I mean they can't think of -- that is one discreet proposal that has real crime-solving impact. It is politically attractive.

GEORGE CLARKE: There already is a procedure we do have in place in California. Again, it's a manpower problem, but our State Department of Justice will accept unsolved cases with extracted DNA, and they will take them the rest of the way. They will actually do the typing, compare it to the limited database that we have, but people in Greg's laboratory, they don't have the manpower to separate those cases out in collaboration with law enforcement to figure out what those cases are to then extract that DNA and ship it off.

BARRY SCHECK: Well, I would even suggest that you can just -- the proposal would be to form some kind of unit that goes in there and systematically goes through those cases, because you and I have been in the lab.

GEORGE CLARKE: You mean a cold case squad in essence?

BARRY SCHECK: That is what I am talking about.

DAVID PETERSON: Well, one of the things that is under discussion partially as a result of this effort is putting together a task force of recently retired executives, free up our active.

GREG MATHESON: To do the evaluation of the case.

BARRY SCHECK: And you, frankly, are in a better position to do this than others, because I actually can read those reports, and I know that, you know, you have bar coded many of these items, and you will be -- you are ahead in terms of computerization of most crime labs. So in theory you get the DR numbers, you stick it into the computer, and you can pull out relevant evidence in the case faster than other jurisdictions so this proposal -- I am still admitted in this state. I mean this proposal is useful. No, I am still there. I am still admitted.

JAMES WOOLEY: Do you do any nonsuspect cases? Did I hear you right?

GREG MATHESON: Well, yeah, we do occasionally. Normally, if -- or to give a classic example, on the west side of LA, we recently had a serial rapist that was working, and through investigative means they felt that they were dealing with the same person. In that situation, we assigned them one of our analysts, and he did every case that was suspected to be from him just DQ2(A)P.M., because that is all that we are currently doing in-house and establish that we are probably dealing with the same person in all of these. So, yes, we do occasionally, but it has got to be a unique situation.

JAMES WOOLEY: In a serial setting like that?

GREG MATHESON: That is in about the time when the media gets involved.

PAUL FERRARA: One final suggestion, Greg, and you may disagree with it, but something we did a long time ago, and that is took all our resources, eliminated conventional serology, eliminate DQ Alpha, eliminate RFLP, eliminate PolyMarkers, and concentrate all the effort on STRs. I mean it's --

GREG MATHESON: To some extent I am short of saying, no, we are not going to take cases for six months, which I have been wanting to do for years to bring everybody up to speed. We did pull everybody off this last week to receive an STR program, and that is -- to some extent that is occurring --

PAUL FERRARA: It's tough to maintain multiple technologies, as you know.

DAVID PETERSON: To put this somewhat perplexing looking financial picture in a little broader perspective for you, if the picture of Los Angeles isn't quite as bleak as we might make it sound, during the last three years, we have gone from a force of 7,800 sworn officers to not quite 10,000. 9,863.

PAUL FERRARA: How many went in the lab?

DAVID PETERSON: None of them went in the lab. That is right, exactly. We have also increased the civilian employment side not nearly to the same proportion that we have increased ours. We are aware of that. We are dealing with it. The economy in Southern California is getting better. Our tax revenue is getting better. We see a somewhat better picture of that in the future, but it's not going to happen right away.

GREG MATHESON: And, actually, you know, that is probably beyond the scope of this commission, but it is something that is a common thing with us in that when personnel is trying to be decided and what is going to be a given to the department, the thing keeps being said that it's awful nice when you have got somebody breaking into your house to have an officer arrive at the door, and they don't want somebody in a lab coat, and that is the philosophy that does tend to go along with that.

BARRY SCHECK: But why don't they put it out for bid? I mean, you know, it does seem -- I mean what about a privatizing solution. Why don't -- I mean if I were you, Greg, I would retire, form a company, right, you know, get a lab, and offer to do the backlog for a certain amount of money, and you could do it efficiently. I am perfectly serious.

GREG MATHESON: I know.

BARRY SCHECK: I mean and the British in a sense quasi, I mean, you know, the police works big. They say, I want this service, and they pay you money for it. I mean in the world of capitalism why don't we do that?

TERRY GAINER: Well, actually in some jurisdictions that is precisely what we are looking at. I can tell you that is why we are waiting in Washington, D.C. to decide whether we are going to build a metro lab. We have reentered negotiations with a private vendor to the tune of about $3 million to work on the backlog, but it still comes down to whether the elected official is going to decide this is an important enough issue to either put the money into the lab, the people, the combination of those. And, frankly, this seems like one of these areas that hopefully after we get this information that will maybe be one of the biggest things the commission does, because I think suggesting to these individuals from LA that, you know, at their level that they are going to try to pull this off is probably slim and remote, because they just don't have the horsepower, and it only becomes done if you get the heads of the law enforcement agencies, along with the heads of the elected officials to say this is an important issue to us. And as long as even, you know, frankly, when you listen to the conversation when we say that whether LA County or LA -- the city of LA, you know, won't give up their turf is part of the very issue that we can't get over. Even if you recognize, the professionals you are, you even mentioned, well, you know, the city doesn't want to give up its turf, and that is permeated through the whole system, and it's only until someone realizes that we have got these tens of thousands of victims out there that none of us have done anything about that we are going to have some significant change, and I think that is what is going to be the powerful statement of this commission. And forgive me for getting up on the high horse.

GREG MATHESON: Bringing back the survey that you were talking about regarding the sexual assault kids, I am assuming you are going to be surveying over the departments, because part of the problem I have seen in surveys that have occurred in the past when you are trying to find out caseload or evidence levels, these to tend survey the laboratories themselves, which don't always -- I mean we happen to have it ourselves, but, you know, our sheriff's department doesn't store their stuff.

CHRISTOPHER ASPLEN: Yeah, we are interested in the departments themselves, not the laboratories.

GREG MATHESON: That will give you a truer indication.

CHRISTOPHER ASPLEN: Thank you, folks. We appreciate it.

(Applause.)

CHRISTOPHER ASPLEN: I'll actually, Greg, I'll give you a copy of that survey before you leave, okay, because I have got it here. I have a roughdraft here.

DOCTOR CROW: We are ahead of schedule, but I have no strong objections to quitting.

PARTICIPANT: I second that.

PARTICIPANT: So moved.

DOCTOR CROW: I am going to call on Chris though for whatever logistic things he wants to say.

CHRISTOPHER ASPLEN: I will try to get you out of here by 5:30. A couple of things, if you could, please. We will have for you at the desk photocopies of a couple of things.

Robin, did we already distribute photocopies of the survey? Yes. Okay. But Phil has put together a memo, if you will, on some of the privacy issues that we are going to be discussing tomorrow. And we are going to photocopy them after today's session. We will leave them at the desk. If you could stop by and pick one up for your review this evening before the discussion tomorrow, that would be great.

In terms of dinner this evening for those who are inclined, we will be going to Skipjacks at 199 Clarendon Street, and it is casual and comfortable and innovative seafood from New England and around the world served in a bustling dining room. We will meet in the lobby at 6:30, and we have a 6:45 reservation for 12. It's just a five-minute walk from here. Okay. If more folks would like to come, I'm sure they will find seats for us, so don't worry about that.

If there are any questions, tomorrow we are starting at -- the address is 199 Clarendon.

DOCTOR CROW: How do you spell that?

CHRISTOPHER ASPLEN: It says C-L-A-R-A-D-O-N.

PARTICIPANT: Misspelled.

CHRISTOPHER ASPLEN: Well, it's also handwritten over what was the original typed version, which is Barkley Street or something. So you all may never get there.

However, let me say emphatically that no matter what, tomorrow's meeting is going to start at nine o'clock. Regardless of what anybody else tells you, whatever letters you received, tomorrow's meeting starts at nine o'clock.

ROBIN STEELE WILSON: There will be breakfast available at 8:30.

CHRISTOPHER ASPLEN: Good. Very nice.

Okay. Any questions? There is a question back there.

DONALD HAYS: Before we adjourn for the day, I am Donald Hays, Director of the Boston Police Crime Laboratory, and with evidence storage issues I was wondering if there are any guidelines for the courts or for the federal courts in regard to evidence storage. I know our Superior Courts are frequently asked the question, because they have large evidence storage rooms for evidence, which has been submitted and entered into the courts. What is happening? Is there -- are there federal guidelines available for federal courts, and are those available for the state courts for their own evidence storage?

CHRISTOPHER ASPLEN: There are no federal guidelines for evidence storage that I am aware of at all.

DONALD HAYS: Are the federal courts storing evidence that is submitted as exhibits, and are those --

CHRISTOPHER ASPLEN: Jim can speak to that better than I.

DONALD HAYS: And is that evidence then subsequently subjected to postconviction analysis? And that is one of the issues I am concerned about.

And how is that evidence being kept by court in storage?

JAMES WOOLEY: Well, the courts don't keep evidence. When a case is closed then it's done, and the original evidence is returned to the prosecutors. The prosecution, we would then give it to the agency, and then that would be incumbent on the agency to store it.

CHRISTOPHER ASPLEN: Are there guidelines to how long the law enforcement agency needs to keep it?

JAMES WOOLEY: Yeah, I am sure the FBI has those guidelines. I mean that would be the question to ask Dwight, who is here, I mean, but it's not a matter of the courts telling us how long to store it, or the court storing it at all. It's a matter of the prosecution's exhibits, they come back to us, we check it back to the office. We give it to them, and we say, see you later.

DONALD HAYS: Okay. And then one of my other concerns is with evidence that is introduced in the court systems, the way that evidence is presented in the courts, taken out of bags, handled, shown around, and then repackaged in some manner, sometimes just thrown back into the bag, gone into property in the courts, made available to the juries for looking at, and then we are subjecting this evidence to postconviction analysis also and DNA testing.

So is there -- is it now the time to set some standards for how evidence should be handled in the courtrooms and subsequent to introduction in the courts for future testing?

JUSTICE REINSTEIN: A very good point.

PAUL FERRARA: An excellent point.

DOCTOR CROW: Good point, actually, yeah.

DARRELL SANDERS: So they are pointing their fingers at the police now?

JUSTICE REINSTEIN: We have standards in our court. I mean I just finished a long trial that had probably 180 exhibits, and we have a box of gloves, and everybody who handles the evidence has to put gloves on for every single piece of evidence, and then it goes to the clerk who reseals it, and she has bags for any kind of biohazard materials or anything like that, and it's done very carefully. And our clerk has those standards for the court. The clerk of court does that. And law enforcement brings all the time to any one of these homicide trials or rape trials, they help supply the gloves, the bags and the like, and we are required to do that. It takes a lot of time.

DONALD HAYS: We do the same things, but then we get evidence returned back to us, in which exhibits are put into bags together with other items of evidence from the case, and that was not the way we presented them into the court. So I think there is a concern as a laboratory director and with issue of postconviction testing of evidence that has been introduced in courts on how it has been handled, how it has been stored and then returned to the laboratories.

GEORGE CLARKE: That probably varies from every jurisdiction to every jurisdiction.

PARTICIPANT: Absolutely, so I think it is time to look at that.

PARTICIPANT: We have no rules in our court system if we decide we can do that. I mean if people decide, the prosecutors decide to work logs, it's because they have talked to the agent examiner and decided they were going to do that.

The court has no role in that at all in any of the different places. I think that is true in New York, too, when I was in the Manhattan DA's office. The court had no role there, couldn't care less, you know, what happened to that evidence after it was presented, admitted and then taken back to wherever.

CHRISTOPHER ASPLEN: And I can tell you as a participant in the prosecutors training, which is probably the most extensive prosecutors training in the country, we don't talk about that. We will in the future, but we haven't up to this point.

PAUL FERRARA: With the uniform statute, will it be including the uniform statute some recommendation that after trial the evidence is returned and resealed just for this eventuality? I mean spell it out.

JUSTICE REINSTEIN: We could. I am talking about right in the middle of trial, the issue comes up what happens when they go in the jury room. Now I give a special instruction to the jury that you are handling biohazardous materials, and we give them gloves, and we give them bags. Now, you know, and in all the cases that I have had, they usually come back the same way. My guess is that most of the time they don't open the bags, because they are so scared about it.

PARTICIPANT: It's grisly stuff.

JUSTICE REINSTEIN: Yeah.

PAUL FERRARA: Well, there are other concerns, too.

GEORGE CLARKE: You mean in your jurisdictions jurors actually can take back into the jury room rape kits, instead of just you having them examined and looking for --

JUSTICE REINSTEIN: Yeah, but they don't -- I am talking about the clothes usually. I mean they get the rape kits, if they want it, but they never touch it. But they do open up -- I mean they have opened up bags of clothes until we started really giving these instructions about biohazards. Now, I started doing that about two years ago when I had the head of a crime lab on a jury, and he was appalled when he saw a detective opening these things up, and he -- we were allowed to ask questions. The jury is allowed to ask questions. He sent in a not a question, but a comment about you have got airborne -- I don't know what you call it.

PAUL FERRARA: Blood-borne pathogens.

JUSTICE REINSTEIN: Floating around the courtroom, and it offends me.

BARRY SCHECK: Well, it is true that DNA can fly.

PARTICIPANT: Don't go there.

DOCTOR CROW: Let me take charge. There is somebody back there.

GREG MATHESON: I think one of the things I was going to point out in LA county, fewer evidence items are actually even being taken into the courtroom. Starting January 1st of this last year, no narcotics or drugs of any type are allowed in the courtroom. Everything is being done by photograph, and more biological evidence and other items are being presented in as photographs, not as the original items.

GEORGE CLARKE: Plus you need those latex gloves so you can put them on under the leather gloves.

PARTICIPANT: You can answer that question, Barry.

DOCTOR CROW: Sorry, folks, this is degenerating.

BARRY SCHECK: Seriously, this is -- we really probably have to address this problem in a very serious way, because it's so clear that the technology in this particular area is advancing so quickly, because, you know, you really -- it isn't -- I said it facetiously, but when you talked about, you know, DNA flying, all right. When you are talking about blood crusts, all right, we now have the technology to identify blood crusts. Bob Shaler (phonetic spelling) of the New York City Medical Examiners Office told me last week he has had done 12 analyses, and got results 11 times from fingerprints. So I mean I think we really do have to talk about careful evidence procedures.

DOCTOR CROW: I forgot, and I should do it right now, to ask if there are any other comments from around the room?

Well, as I said before, we are not as early as we were. Unless there is something else, I'll declare the meeting adjourned.

(Whereupon, at 4:50 p.m., the meeting was adjourned.)

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