Crime lab move to expedite testing
Houston crime lab’s new space will speed up testing, ensure independence from police department, officials say
For more than a decade, the Houston Police Department’s crime lab was the poster child of forensic scandal: Rape kit backlogs, evidence compromised by a leaky roof, faked drug testing.
Eventually, police and city officials said enough was enough. They began a yearslong process of untangling the crime lab from HPD and into an independent agency, the Houston Forensic Science Center. And though HPD transferred management of its crime lab to the center in 2014, the physical lab remained in the police department’s downtown headquarters.
That changed Tuesday, when the agency officially unveiled its new home, a gleaming new facility in an existing high-rise building at 500 Jefferson St., with state-of-theart labs, ventilation systems and a consolidated design.
Dr. Peter Stout, the center’s president, said the 83,000square-foot space will help the agency shed its scandal-ridden past, speed up testing, reduce backlogs, and serve as a model for the rest of the country. “Doing something different with a crime lab is not easy,” Stout said at a Tuesday news conference. “To actually address issues of a crime laboratory and fundamentally change how a crime lab is run, is not easy.”
The shift will also underscore that the center is truly independent, officials say.
“It’s great to see a scientist leading scientists, instead of necessarily a cop leading scientists, ” Houston Police Chief
Art Acevedo said. “But most importantly, that separation, I think it better positions us moving forward.”
Conditions at the decadesold police headquarters building had made it hard for the crime lab to make changes, such as adding more powerful laboratory machines, Stout said. In the previous location, lab technicians transported evidence up to seven miles over the course of regular testing. Technicians tested guns by firing live ammunition on the 24th floor, with offices above and below, and office space spread over 11 floors in four buildings.
“This is how forensic labs
happen all over the country,” he said, ruefully recalling the situation. “It grows organically without any central organization to it. That’s what this was — it was spread all over the place.”
The new space consolidates all those operations onto three floors, with all the wet labs on just one. Instead of firing bullets on an upper floor of a high-rise — “it was crazy,” said HFSC spokeswoman Ramit Plushnick-Masti — the new lab has a firing range in the building’s basement. There are also newer electrical systems capable of powering the lab’s intricate toxicology testing equipment; improved ventilation systems designed to prevent contamination of fragile DNA samples; and a streamlined floor layout that Stout said would help speed up daily workflow.
The new lab will perform testing in seven disciplines, including its crime scene unit, latent prints, firearms, toxicology, seized drugs, DNA and multimedia. In addition to the basement firing room, the center has a room with electric cabinets designed to dry wet evidence. On Tuesday, a torn shirt covered in rust-colored blood stains, torn from where paramedics had cut it apart as they fought to save the victim who had worn it, dried in one cabinet.
Mayor Sylvester Turner said the agreement enabling the center’s move is “an incredible deal” that allows the city to absorb the cost of the buildout at a similar price to what the lab was paying in its old location.
“I’m not exaggerating when I compare today with other big moments in Houston’s
history,” he said. “In 2014, the HFSC left epic scandal and doubt behind when it became independent from HPD. But until now this agency did not have the right facility, space, or equipment to reach the highest level of reliable science that is so crucial to the criminal system and to the victims of crime such as sex assault and murder.”
Prior to 2014, the crime lab had earned a reputation for missed deadlines and shoddy work. A culmination of serious management, employee and structural problems — including a roof that leaked rainwater onto evidence — led the HPD crime lab to temporarily halt testing in 2002. City officials at one point considered merging with the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences, which serves law enforcement agencies from Harris and other nearby counties, but decided against it. At one point, the Houston crime lab’s backlog in untested rape kits topped 6,600.
The center has worked hard to bring those numbers down. Currently it has a backlog of 224 biology (rape kits/DNA) tests; 2,082 latent prints; 707 alcohol tests, and 526 specimens needing drug testing, according to its website.
But even as the forensic science center has struggled to overcome the tarnished reputation of HPD’s crime lab, it has drawn criticism.
In January 2018, the lab fired an analyst who had shredded case notes from a homicide investigation. An April 2017 audit revealed mistakes by a crime scene investigator in 65 cases, including 26 homicides, which hindered those prosecutions. A year earlier, investigators mistakenly contaminated evidence in three cases. It again attracted scandal after a deadly January drug raid by Houston police narcotics officers, after which crime scene technicians left pieces of evidence behind at the scene of the raid, a small home in Pecan Park.
Nevertheless, police and criminal justice reform advocates said they believed the new lab will make the public more confident in its independence and overall mission.
“This is such an advance from when I was a prosecutor,” said Elsa Alcala, a former judge who retired in 2018 from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and is now a board member of the Texas Innocence Project. “The old lab felt like a dungeon. It’s wonderful that you have separation between police and scientists, so lab personnel don’t feel beholden to police. The fact it’s independent is a real step forward.”