SCIENCE FICTION

Why Would We Even Think About Giving This Guy His Own Crime Lab?

You want to understand what's wrong with Dallas City Hall, to say nothing
of the police department? Think about this: A year ago Dallas police were
caught making cases against more than 70 defendants based on fake drug
evidence.

Now the city manager and the police chief are moving toward a system that
would raise new secrecy walls around drug testing and make it harder for
anybody to catch the department the same way again. After the gypsum "fake
drugs" scandal hit the fan, Dallas County District Attorney Bill Hill set
up a new system to prevent it from happening again. Hill wanted to be sure
any more fake drug evidence would get caught early on, set off alarms,
raise red flags and alert his people and the Dallas Police Department there
was another drug evidence problem in the pipeline. The police department's
version of the scandal from the beginning has been that innocent,
unsuspecting, naive narcotics officers were duped by wily confidential
informants (CIs) who were planting fake drugs on defendants in order to
earn hundreds of thousands of dollars in snitch fees. That's their story.
We don't make this stuff up. We hope the narcs were provided with
counseling to help them recover their trust.

Hill took the department at its word and set up a system to watch for
crooked CIs. Under Hill's new setup, lab results from drug testing go
immediately to his office by computer.

A program matches the results with code-numbered CIs. A pattern of "false
positives" (drug samples that turn out not to be drugs) linked to a
particular CI sets off an alarm. Hill's people see it. They pick up the
phone to the police department and tell them there's a situation that needs
an explanation. The response of Dallas City Manager Ted Benavides and
police Chief Terrell Bolton has been to try to change the system of drug
testing in ways that would either cut the district attorney's office out of
the picture entirely or at least put it at arm's length.

The changes under consideration at City Hall would give all of the
evidence-testing work to a private contractor who would work exclusively
for the police department.

The city manager and the chief are going to say the only thing they want to
do is reduce costs and serve the public better, and I'm going to tell you
all about that. But let's keep our eye on the big ball here: In the gypsum
fake-drugs scandal, innocent lives were brutalized by the official system.
Even though no investigation has yet produced results to explain what
really happened, people have a right to worry that the Dallas Police
Department may have been in on it.

Until the police department is able to prove that it's clean, the
department is dirty in the public's mind. The department has no credibility
on this. If it wants credibility, it has to build new credibility from the
ground up. Instead, the city began some months ago seeking bids from
private laboratories to do the work that is now done by the Southwestern
Institute for Forensic Science (SWIFS). SWIFS is a county entity, separate
from law enforcement, with broad ties to the academic community, especially
through the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. The private
labs whose bids the city has been considering are commercial entities whose
sole connection would be to the city and police department, to whom they
would look for payment.

The original request for bids posted by the city on its Web site required
that lab results go exclusively to the police department, effectively
putting Hill's system of red flags and alarms out of business.

I have spoken with a variety of people on the local and national scene who
are familiar with crime labs and crime lab problems; they all say any move
to put a crime lab under the control of a police department is a move in
exactly the wrong direction.

I asked attorney Barry Scheck, a co-founder of the Innocence Project at
Cardozo Law School in New York City, if he thought the governance of crime
labs--their public accountability and transparency--is an important issue.
He said no. It's the issue.

"The most important issue is establishing independence for the crime labs,
so that they are an independent third force in the criminal justice system,
not beholden to the police, the prosecutor or the defense," Scheck said.
"Anything that interferes with public officials seeing ultimately all the
scientific data from the lab is misguided and wrong." Defense lawyers in
Dallas told me an interesting thing: They always want to put the crime lab
on trial, to tell the jury, "You can't believe that lab, they're all
hand-in-glove with the cops." But that tactic doesn't work very often with
SWIFS, they said, because SWIFS is too good and too open. Peter Lesser, a
defense lawyer well known in the city for his willingness to go
head-to-head and toe-to-toe with the police department, said the forensic
scientists at SWIFS tend to be willing to meet with either side to present
and defend their findings.