The 2007 Survey of Law Enforcement Forensic Evidence Processing

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Kevin J. Strom, Jeri Ropero-Miller, Shelton Jones, Nathan Sikes, Mark Pope, and Nicole Horstmann

Introduction

Many research efforts and financial investments have supported the need to improve our nation’s forensic evidence processing, which is critical for investigating, prosecuting, and defending criminal cases. Yet while the processing and movement of forensic evidence in crime laboratories has been documented in surveys and reports, there has been a limited amount of research to determine the current size of forensic evidence caseloads in law enforcement agencies, as well as to determine their capacity for collecting and processing forensic evidence. Ultimately, case backlogs must be quantified in order to help estimate the number of unsolved criminal cases in the United States that may benefit from timely forensic analysis.

The NIJ-funded Survey of Law Enforcement Forensic Evidence Processing (LEFP) was conducted to estimate the number of unsolved criminal cases containing forensic evidence that had not been submitted to crime laboratories for analysis. Unsolved (or open) cases were defined as cases that had not been officially cleared by the law enforcement agency, including all cases that had not been closed by arrest or cleared by exceptional means (for example, cases closed because of the death of the primary suspect).

Specific objectives of the LEFP survey included the following:

1. Estimating the number of homicide, rape, and property cases reported during 2007 for which forensic evidence was collected
2. Developing national estimates for the number of unsolved homicide, rape, and property cases in state and local law enforcement agencies over the past 5 years that contain forensic evidence but that have not been submitted to a crime laboratory for analysis
3. Estimating the types of forensic evidence (biologicals to include DNA, trace evidence, latent print, firearms/toolmarks) that comprise the nation’s forensic evidence caseload for homicides, rapes, and property crimes
4. Describing the policies and procedures used in U.S. law enforcement agencies for processing, submitting, and retaining forensic evidence, as well as the availability of information systems capable of tracking forensic evidence inventory

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Read the report:

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