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[Silence]
>> Good morning everybody, Sandy Koch and I are going
to be presenting about the evaluation assessment
of the recent Trace Questionnaire that was sent
out to various individuals to assess the current state
of affairs of Trace Evidence.
We're going to do it in two parts, I'm going to start
and do the numerical data evaluation
and then Sandy Koch will be doing the comments in regards
to significant issues as well as the Nation Academy Report.
And after we're done we're going to open it up to you guys
for discussion and hoping to generate quite a bit
of discussion and we just ask that everybody
when you approach the microphone that you state your name
and your organization that you represent.
The goal of the assessment was to assess the current state
of affairs of trace evidence.
We actually sent out a questionnaire to lab employees
as well as law enforcement employees and we captured a lot
of data but we're just going to highlight some points here
and hope to publish the remaining data.
And the points that we're going to talk
about today is how are we perceived
within the trace community and from other disciplines,
what sub disciplines are being analyzed
and what methods are being used.
What are the significant issues facing trace evidence
and what is the impact
of the National Academy Report on trace evidence.
The questionnaire was distributed
to the ASCLD/LAB delegates, the attendees
of the FBI management symposium, regional organizations all
of you here present in this room received one as well
and it was also posted on the AFQAM web site
and it was also posted on the Trace Yahoo group so I apologize
if people received it numerous times.
We ended up with 149 responses representing
at least 102 laboratories, I say at least 102 laboratories
because we did receive some that were anonymous and I don't know
if they represent new laboratories or if they were
from laboratories already represented.
So we did get quite a few responses.
For the data analysis each participating laboratory was
included once except for some of the larger systems
such as Michigan, and Florida and Texas
where they have regional trace laboratories.
We ended up with 121 responses included in the data analysis
and the data analysis is for the numerical data
and then everybody was included in what Sandy will be talking
about in regards to the significant issues
in the National Academy Report.
Out of the 121 responses,
104 labs currently have a trace evidence unit dedicated.
The remaining 17 labs did not have a unit dedicated
to trace evidence analysis.
This was the breakdown of the 102 labs represented
in the results of the questionnaire,
we did have 8 federal laboratories
and then we did have a good population of state laboratories
as well as local laboratories and there were 4 laboratories
that left the answer blank.
And we had it from both national laboratories
and international laboratories.
Here's the breakdown of the accrediting bodies
for the trace laboratories, as you can see the majority is
from ASCLD/LAB legacy but we do have a fair number being
international and those of you who've been talking
with John Neuner that seems
to be changing and that probably the next time we have our
symposium you will see a change from legacy
to international being the primary accrediting body.
We did have three labs that were accredited by FQS
and there were seven laboratories
that were not accredited at all.
And then we also had seven laboratories
that were accredited by another accrediting body
and those are primarily international laboratories.
Here's a breakdown of the subdisciplines being analyzed
by trace laboratories, of the 102 trace laboratories,
I'm sorry 104 trace laboratories and you can see that paint
and fiber are the primary disciplines as well
as physical match and soils and feather are on the back end.
And you can see hairs are still being represented
by a good portions of laboratories as well as glass.
We had 96 laboratories that were currently conducting paint
analysis, everybody was doing a macroscopical
or microscopical exam of the paint evidence followed
by the majority of the population doing FTIR analysis
and polarized light microscopy.
SEMEDS did have a fair number of folks doing that method as well
where as XRF and XRD being only represented
by a few laboratories.
For fibers we had 96 laboratories currently
conducting fiber analysis, again we have 100 percent
of folks doing macroscopical or microscopical examination
of the evidence and followed closely behind
by polarized light microscopy.
The majority of folks and almost all folks are doing FTIR
but there are some laboratories
that are not currently doing FTIR analysis on fibers
and not all laboratories are doing comparison microscopy.
There's only a small portion of laboratories
that are currently doing thin layer chromatography
for fiber analysis.
Glass was represented by 69 laboratories
and as you can see the majority
of folks were doing color analysis and then a lot
of folks were doing the refractive index
at the various wavelengths.
And there's not too many people that is doing LIBS.
Human hair comparisons,
75 laboratories are still doing human hair comparisons
and of the 75 laboratories 100 percent
of folks are doing the suitability for DNA analysis,
81 percent are doing macroscopical comparisons
and 77 percent are still doing microscopical comparisons.
More folks are doing somatic origin
versus racial characteristics.
Animal hair, 75 laboratories are doing some sort of examination
for animal hair examinations,
71 percent of those laboratories are doing species determination,
52 percent are doing microscopical comparisons
and 48 percent of the 75 laboratories are doing
microscopical comparisons on animal hairs.
This chart represents the case load for the past five years
and as you can see the majority of the labs
which is encouraging has either increased their trace evidence
case load or has remained the same
and only a smaller portion has decreased their case load.
This chart represents the monthly case output per analyst
with the majority of folks completing one
to four cases per month, followed by five
to eight cases a month being the next dominant category.
There were some folks that are doing 20-plus cases a month
and those folks are primarily doing R Center GSR.
This chart represents the number of trace analysts
versus the total population of forensic scientists
in the trace laboratories that participated
in the survey...sorry questionnaire.
We have only a small slice of the pie as you can see
that 92 percent of the total population
of forensic scientists is something other
than trace evidence
and we represent 8 percent of the population.
This chart demonstrates the years of experience
that was asked on the questionnaire
and as you can see it's very encouraging that we have a lot
of new examiners into the field
and then it's somewhat concerning
that we also have a lot of examiners at 20-plus years
that will soon be leaving.
One of the questions we asked was that who's generalist
versus who's a specialist,
can we see a trend that's being developed versus what used
to be versus what is now.
The majority of folks are becoming generalists
with only a small population being specialists.
There were some labs that trained both as far
as generalists and specialists and the thoughts were
that they are now training as generalists but they would
like to be specialists and there are still a few folks
within their labs that are truly specialists
but it did seem the trend was going towards that with the lack
of funding and the increased demands that people need
to start doing more disciplines and there isn't as much time
or emphasis on specialists and then there was also
about ten served questionnaires that left the answer blank.
And this chart represents the number of lab analysts
that are currently processing crime scenes and as you can see
about 50 or so people are still processing crime scenes
of the survey response.
And there were 17 labs without trace evidence,
there were 6 labs that at one time had trace evidence
and here were the reasons for elimination of trace evidence
and this is directly from the questionnaire,
we are a small state, we did not receive many trace cases,
it was expensive and difficult to keep an examiner competent
and another person from the same laboratory wrote,
no second analyst for peer review, lack of demand due
to the lack of investigator's knowledge of availability.
Other folks wrote loss of staff and no replacement made
which is somewhat like discouraging in the sense
that if you remember that previous slide
that there was quite a few people that are getting ready
to retire and is this something that we'll see more
in the future, the fact that when people leave,
are they not going to hire a new person.
Lack of casework, hairs, fibers, paint, glass, footwear
and tire tracks were eliminated due to the lack of staffing
and state-of-the-art equipment, budget and lack
of submitted cases and I left this one for last.
Backlogs in biology and DNA and firearms,
force of relocation of resources out of the trace
into those units and I will turn it over to Sandy Koch.