Law enforcement awaits crime lab

It’s a scene that plays out all too often in Springfield and Greene County, according to local law enforcement officials. A new crime lab could help change that.

A consortium of 15 local banks has offered a low-interest loan to Springfield and Greene County for the $2.4 million needed to renovate the old L.E. Cox Building at 440 E. Tampa St. into a regional crime lab.

Springfield City Council voted at its April 17 meeting to enter into the loan agreement. The loan would be interest-only for five years, during which time the city and the county are to seek additional funding to pay down the principal. The lab would be leased to the state for $1 a year.

Limited capabilities

The Springfield Police department does currently have a crime lab, but according to Public Information Officer Matt Brown, its capabilities can be summed up in two words: extremely limited.

“It’s almost a misuse of words to call it a crime lab, because it is in no sense of the word a lab,” Brown said. “It’s an area that we have some officers working in that are able to do photo processing and work on fingerprints.”

It’s nothing like the Hollywood image of the police crime lab – but, according to Brown, a real crime lab, even one that’s fully equipped, isn’t anything like that.

“When you use that term in and around the general public, they envision a setting like (CBS program) ‘CSI,’” Brown said. “They imagine people walking around in white robes, carrying around tubes with colored liquids that they pour into vials and look at under microscopes, using computers to bring up DNA analysis.”

While television and movies may exaggerate the speed of modern forensic technology, the new lab will allow local law enforcement to do some of the analysis work without having to send it away.

“There’s a significant amount of processing that needs to be done in police work, including those things that we don’t have the capability to do here,” Brown said. “If it’s anything that deals with any types of fluids, tissue, any types of cloth sample – carpet, clothing – or any combination of those, all of that has to be sent off.”

He added that it’s too early to say what equipment the new facility would have; work with architects is ongoing to determine exactly how much space will be available for new equipment.

The process of waiting for evidence processing and turnaround can take anywhere from a few months for the most urgent situations to two years in nonurgent cases.

Crowded conditions

Decreased wait time for evidence with the local lab facility will help alleviate one key problem local enforcement has been facing for years: jail overcrowding.

Greene County Sheriff Jack Merritt said the county jail holds, on an average night, from 550 to 580 people. Its “reasonable capacity” is about 480, he said.

Merritt said that as many as 280 of the people being held at the jail on any given day are those waiting for trial.

There’s another savings, though, according to Merritt, and it’s not just in time spent waiting for test results.

“A great financial return is the amount of time that the state has technicians on the road,” Merritt said. “They drive three hours from Jefferson City, wait an hour to give 15 minutes of testimony in a preliminary hearing, and then they drive three hours back. They’ve lost a day’s worth of lab time for 15 or 20 minutes of testimony.”

It’s for those reasons and others that the consortium of 15 local banks stepped up to help.

“Banks understand need and leverage,” said Brian Fogle, community development director for Great Southern Bank. Fogle spearheaded the consortium. “We knew that there was several million dollars of federal and state money that would have literally gone away because of this gap of a little more than $2 million. We felt like it was something that needed to be done.”

In December, Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt announced that the state will provide, during the next three years, funding for 21 employees at the new crime lab, at a total cost of about $1.75 million. The federal government has committed $1.5 million for the purchase of crime-lab equipment.

Springfield design firm Buxton Kubik Dodd is working with the city and county as a consultant for the initial phases of the crime lab project.