By Peter Stout

Houston TX experienced a widely known failure of its police forensic laboratory. This gave rise to the Houston Forensic Science Center (HFSC) as a separate entity to provide forensic services to the City of Houston. HFSC is a very large forensic laboratory and has made significant progress at remediating the past failures and improving public trust in forensic testing. HFSC has a large and robust blind testing program, which has provided many insights into the challenges forensic laboratories face. HFSC’s journey from a notoriously failed lab to a model also gives perspective to the resource challenges faced by all labs in the country. Challenges for labs include the pervasive reality of poor- quality evidence. Also that forensic laboratories are necessarily part of a much wider system of interdependent functions in criminal justice making blind testing something in which all parts have a role. This interconnectedness also highlights the need for an array of oversight and regulatory frameworks to function properly. The major essential databases in forensics need to be a part of blind testing programs and work is needed to ensure that the results from these databases are indeed producing correct results and those results are being correctly used. Last, laboratory reports of “inconclusive” results are a significant challenge for laboratories and the system to better understand when these results are appropriate, necessary and most importantly correctly used by the rest of the system.

PNAS 2023 vol. 120, no. 41

By Copan

Since the first use of DNA fingerprinting in 1986, forensic genetics has rapidly evolved. Today, scientists are implementing quicker, more specific, and more sensitive techniques such as NGS, phenotyping, microRNAs, and microbiome analysis, detective tools that could soon be applied to criminal cases and represent the future of forensics investigation. That’s why now, more than ever, the need for a neat biological evidence collection must be recognized.

By making its patented FLOQ technology ISO 18385 compliant, Copan anticipated this need back in 2011, launching its 4N6 forensics evidence collection line. Designed in 2003 to answer the need of healthcare professionals for a more efficient sample collection, the FLOQ technology ensures a quick, capillarity-driven sample uptake and, unlike conventional wrapped-fiber swabs, an efficient elution of the biological specimen thanks to the perpendicular arrangement of the short Nylon fibers

NY. Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. 2023 . 56p.

By Craig D. Uchida; Shellie E. Solomon, Christine Connor, John McCluskey, Charles M. Katz, Michael D. White, Quin Patterson, Allie Land, John Markovic, with Kyle Anderson & Jennifer Schmitz

Digital Evidence Management (DEM) encompasses a wide variety of devices, technologies, tools, and data, particularly as they relate to the criminal justice system (Goodison, Davis, and Jackson, 2015). This report is about body-worn cameras (BWCs) and the digital evidence (footage) created by the technology. The main purpose of the study is to understand and explain the key challenges faced by law enforcement agencies and prosecutor offices as they use BWCs routinely. Taking a case study approach, we examine the process for managing BWC footage in seven agencies: Two large police departments (Phoenix, AZ and Los Angeles, CA); two mid-size police agencies (Glendale, AZ and Rochester, NY); a Sheriff's Office (Harris County, TX), and a collaborative effort in South Florida (Broward County State Attorney's Office and Fort Lauderdale Police Department).

Silver Spring, MD: Justice and Security Strategies, 2022. 83p.

By Laura E. Joyce

Representations of forensic procedures saturate popular culture in both fiction and true crime. One of the most striking forensic tools used in these narratives is the chemical luminol, so named because it glows an eerie greenish-blue when it comes into contact with the tiniest drops of human blood. Luminol is a deeply ambivalent object: it is both a tool of the police, historically abused and misappropriated, and yet it offers hope to families of victims by allowing hidden crimes to surface. Forensic enquiry can exonerate those falsely accused of crimes, and yet the rise of forensic science is synonymous with the development of the deeply racist ‘science’ of eugenics. Luminol Theory investigates the possibility of using a tool of the state in subversive, or radical, ways. By introducing luminol as an agent of forensic inquiry, Luminol Theory approaches the exploratory stages that a crime scene investigation might take, exploring experimental literature as though these texts were ‘crime scenes’ in order to discover what this deeply strange object can tell us about crime, death, and history, to make visible violent crimes, and to offer a tangible encounter with death and finitude. At the luminol-drenched crime scene, flashes of illumination throw up words, sentences, and fragments that offer luminous, strange glimpses, bobbing up from below their polished surfaces. When luminol shines its light, it reveals, it is magical, it is prescient, and it has a nasty allure

Santa Barbara, CA: Punctum Books, 2017. 137p.