National Institute of Justice: How to preserve biological evidence.

Evidence custodians and law enforcement managers will soon have access to a resource that has long been needed and desired in the United States: a definitive guide to the handling of biological evidence.

That guide, The Biological Evidence Preservation Handbook: Best Practices for Evidence Handlers, was produced by the Technical Working Group on Biological Evidence Preservation. The working group, co-sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), convened in August 2010 and met nine times during a two-year period.

Members of the 23-person group included law enforcement managers, a property manager, a representative from the Innocence Project, a law professor, a crime scene investigator, a criminalist, and a research biologist. They merged their varied backgrounds to “create best practices and guidance on how to properly preserve, process, store, and track biological evidence to safeguard against contamination, premature destruction, or degradation.”

Melissa Taylor, management and program analyst for the Forensic Science Program at NIST’s Law Enforcement Standards Office (OLES), said the working group was greatly needed by the forensic community because of the disparate nature of evidence-handling procedures across the criminal justice system in the United States.

“Agency investments in new testing equipment and improvements to forensic analysis techniques are wasted when evidence cannot be found or is not properly preserved,” said Taylor. “The criminal justice system relies on biological evidence when determining innocence and guilt and proper evidence management plays a critical role in ensuring that justice is ultimately served.”

Names, places, and circumstances change, but the headlines appearing regularly in U.S. media outlets are mostly the same: evidence turns up misplaced, mishandled, stolen, or destroyed. Taylor and others are quick to point out that blame should not be placed on evidence custodians. Instead, they point to a complete lack of standardization in this area of forensic science.

In the introduction to the new handbook, the working group writes, “Many law enforcement agencies do not properly address, recognize, or support the efforts of their property rooms. While these agencies bear ultimate responsibility for maintaining the integrity of the evidence, the real problem lies with a systemic failure to properly account for evidence from collection through final disposition.”

In simplistic terms, a property and evidence room is a warehouse of “stuff” that must be inventoried, tracked, and managed. Joseph Latta, executive director and lead instructor with the International Association for Property and Evidence, Inc. admitted it is not fair to expect a law enforcement specialist to come to their job with a skill set that allows them to manage such an operation.

“Police departments are overseen by police managers,” said Latta. “What experience do most police managers have in taking care of a warehouse of evidence? The answer is: Almost none. And if they do figure it out, they often get promoted, transferred, or they retire. So there is a constant change of philosophies, and those philosophies on how we run our property room have been based on that individual’s expertise.

“How do we do a good job in the property room managing this stuff when that’s not our world?”
To answer that question, the Technical Working Group on Biological Evidence Preservation went to the professionals who are engaged daily in the business of inventory and warehouse management.

“We were able to look at commercial entities like Walmart and Target. Their bottom line depends on being able to track and retrieve items,” said Taylor. “We looked at how they apply these technologies and where there were overlaps between the forensic community and these agencies.”

The result of that investigation is a section in the new handbook that details the tracking of the biological-evidence chain of custody. This includes guidance for selecting management and tracking software, automated identification technologies (such as barcoding or radio frequency identification), property room management software, and laboratory information management systems.
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