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>> Thank you very much, Ken.
And it's, I think, very timely and certainly an honor
for our panelists to be invited and to have an opportunity
to address you during this trace evidence symposium.
One of the things that's very apparent is
that we have excellent representation
of forensic scientist practitioners
and the relevant criminal justice community
represented here.
And one of the things, which is not lost on the objectives
of this subcommittee on forensic science, is the unique situation
in the United States, unlike the UK and France and Germany
and many of the other western civilized countries
where forensic science is largely provided
at the federal level.
In the United States, thanks to our constitution
and state sovereignty, we have over 95 percent
of all forensic science analysis done
at the state and local level.
The role that the federal government plays is,
in many cases, more for the purposes of providing support
and guidance and structure than it is
to actually perform the analysis.
And consequently, that unique aspect
of the geopolitical structure of the forensic science community
in the United States on the one hand poses certain problems
that were highlighted in the NAS report saying that the community
as a whole is largely fragmented and consequently improvements
that are made, policies that are created are very difficult
to implement with over 400 individually autonomous crime
laboratories at the state and local level.
So the challenge is there.
And I want to begin my remarks this morning
by telling you how much we understand that the success
of this subcommittee depends on the degree
to which we can manage to solicit and obtain
and digest input from the 95 percent non federal forensic
science community.
Guidance and implementation is important at the federal level,
but unlike many other programs and communities,
this particular NSTC subcommittee must have the input
and technology transferred to state and locals.
That means state and local government agencies,
but it also means private sector criminal justice community
participants that include judges and prosecutors and defense
and professional organizations and all of those
who have a vested interest and who impact
and are impacted by forensic science.
So it's a big mandate and we have a very large audience,
but we want you to know that we understand.
And I speak to you at the moment as a federal employee working
for the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
And I have for the past year.
But for 37 years before that, I was in either the private sector
or state crime laboratories in Illinois and Michigan.
So I understand firsthand the frustrations in trying
to develop and maintain good partnerships
with the federal government.
So hopefully I can remember what that feels like and try
to implement an effective outreach.
And one of the things that you'll hear today is
from our panelist who is in the inter agency working group
for outreach and communications.
And we have dedicated a specific working group for that purpose.
So it is a serious, we take that responsibility very seriously.
The subcommittee itself was officially chartered July 7th
as Ken said and the subcommittee itself is put together
with ultimately responsibility for implementation by review
of the co chairs of the subcommittee.
And there is a co chair from the White House, Dwayne Blackburn,
whose expertise is in policy and two subject matter co chairs
in Ken and myself in the area of criminal justice
and forensic science and as a forensic science practitioner
at my level.
I also represent NIST, so because of the fact
that standards are a critical part that was cited
in the recommendations that you'll hear
about from our panelists today, it is timely for me to be
in a position to represent the National Institute of Standards
and Technology for implementation recommendations
which come from this panel and come
from the forensic science community at large.
[ Silence ]
Again, I think that it's worth saying
that we want broad inclusion
and the way the subcommittee was structured initially was
to reach out with the charter that we have enabling us
to get input from all of these federal agencies.
As you can see, each one of them
that is listed there has a forensic science laboratory
or forensic science laboratory services
that serve the needs of those agencies.
And this is a starting point.
We have selected five inter agency groups
and you'll be hearing from the co chairs or members of each
of these groups today.
They're research, development, let me back up.
These five committees were created
by consolidating the categories of the 13 recommendations
from the National Academy of Science Report.
And one of the reasons that we are not providing a list
at the introduction of what those recommendations are is
that you'll hear them in each
of these particular working group descriptions.
But we embodied those 13 recommendations
in categories that fit together.
And they break down into roughly these five categories.
The first is research,
development, test, and evaluation.
The second is standards, practices, and protocols.
The third is education and ethics.
The fourth is certification, accreditation and licensing
or proficiency testing.
And the fifth is outreach and communications.
This is a rather detailed slide and I won't go through it
but as you can see what has happened is
that we've pulled together
from the recommendations what actions are necessary
to implement strategic plans for improving forensic science,
forensic science capacity, infrastructure, standards,
quality and the seven bullet points that follow are taken
from individual recommendations from the NAS report.
Since all of you in this room undoubtedly have either read,
the review or you've seen the 13 recommendations I don't feel
that I need to elaborate on them at this point.
But the other thing is that you'll notice
that in the first two bullet points under inventory
and analysis of forensic science challenges and activities,
cataloging internal and external recommendations on how
to improve methods and implementation is featured
at the top of our agenda.
That is what we need to do in order to get an arm around how
to approach what we want to recommend
to the executive branch and what we need to recommend to congress
for activities that the executive branch currently isn't
authorized or doesn't have the power to implement.
And we'll work with congress in forum recommendations
to enable them to legislate in order to implement any
of those strategies that require a change in the law in order
to satisfy one of those recommendations.
We also want to identify the existing and planned private
and governmental efforts, whose goals are to improve methods
and implementation of forensic science and services.
One of the things you'll hear from the education
and training committee is that we are in desperate need
of serious, formalized, well-funded college
and university programs in forensic science.
Not just for teaching and generating a cadre
of well-trained forensic science students who are prepared
to enter our profession, the demand will be huge,
but also to interest universities
in doing serious forensic science research using the
scientific methods and research tools that are available
at the university level.
And we have only a smattering of that in this country.
It's something that needs to be increased.
I don't want to steal from the slides of the education
and training committee but I wanted you to know
that that's one example among many of identifying
where in this country we already have existing programs
and integrating them or boot strapping in order
to reach higher-level goals
that are recommended in the NAS report.
These are potential activities that are listed of RDT
and E the research, development, testing, and evaluation portion
of the recommendations of the NAS will be addressed in detail
in a few minutes, so I'm going to skip the bullet points here.
You'll hear about each of these in the formal presentation.
The standards, practices and protocols,
this particular group is going to have
to spend time defining what is meant by standards
and to define what we intend to do
for improving practices and protocols.
And there is a lot of organizational, scientific,
and political implications in this particular group.
Education and ethics, formal education, in service training
for practitioners who are already working, what we can do
to augment significant increases in the number and quality
of training, in service training programs
that are available to practitioners.
And ethics, we have to develop a code of ethics,
or consider how we would go about developing a code
of ethics that would be applied
across the entire forensic science community.
Accreditation and certification, as you know,
the recommendations were to make them mandatory,
and this presents a series of problems in terms
of both implementation and funding.
Outreach and communications, this is the responsibility
that we have as a group to take in the existing documentation,
input, and resources that are available that the NAS
Report didn't detect, didn't hear from witnesses,
or didn't record in their report.
There's a lot out there and we need to be able
to collect everything that's currently existing
and do gap analysis to determine what else needs to be done.
So we have a lot before us.
And given the fact that all of the people who are in front
of you have day jobs, we hope that we'll be able
to bring the resources necessary with your help and information
in our outreach in order to achieve the goals
that you're going to hear are being potential goals
that we'll be considering,
And I think I've said probably more than I should have,
but in any case the other thing I wanted to tell you is that all
of these things that we have so far are preliminary.
We haven't taken any official stand,
we have no official recommendations that need
to be made, and they'll need to be vetted through all
of the proper places in order to achieve that.
We also don't have a formal structure yet.
Oh, there's another slide I wanted to show you.
We don't have a formal structure yet either for the outreach
and websites, but we're planning on creating websites.
The two that were suggested here, forensicscience.gov,
and forensicsciencecatalogue.org are going to need approval
from the White House, so we don't have that set up yet.
And either these websites or some version will be intended
to have an open communication with you.
Another thing I wanted to mention to you,
I've already addressed external collaboration,
if you look at the third bullet point under Charter,
if you want to read the charter of our committee, it's available
at ostp.gov/nstc and you can navigate through the committee
on science, the subcommittee on forensic science and one
of the attachments which is available is this charter.
Or, and I'm sorry it's not on your handouts,
but this will be made available and certainly it's pretty long
to copy, but it's public information.
It is the direct URL for the charter.
So we're mindful of the need
for open government and transparency.
That's sort of the mantra for this group.
And it's a serious, one that we take seriously.
So at this point, we'll make the transition
for the next slide show and Jeff,
please share RDT and E with them.
Thank you very much.