Hennepin crime lab riding the DNA wave to boom times

Want more evidence that DNA is the wave of the future in crime fighting?

As the supply of cases requiring genetic code analysis continues to grow, Hennepin County is remodeling its crime lab to accommodate mounting demands and also getting federal help to hire more forensic scientists.

Moreover, next week the County Board is slated to consider forming a task force to weigh the pros and cons of building a new crime lab to be shared by Hennepin County and Minneapolis.

Hennepin County already has an accredited, state-of-the-art downtown facility, Sheriff Rich Stanek said. But a merged operation could prove efficient and convenient as well as relieve some of the burden carried by the busy lab in St. Paul of the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA), where Minneapolis now has its DNA samples processed.

DNA is "where policing is headed," Stanek said Thursday.

With the Hennepin County lab handling 3,000 calls a year from 32 suburban police departments and occasional outstate or federal agencies, county commissioners this summer agreed to spend $420,000 to remodel the county's eight-year-old crime lab building to make more room for DNA work.

When the remodeling is finished later this year, the new space will be filled with seven new employees -- analysts, screeners, an evidence specialist and a secretary -- to handle DNA cases.

Their addition should help speed up work considerably.

It now takes about two months for the Hennepin lab to provide DNA results in violent crime cases, and about six months for property crime cases. With the newly expanded space and staff, Stanek said, the goal is to chop in half the turnaround time in both kinds of cases.

The larger staff will enable Hennepin County to do a better job of tackling property crime cases, which get a lower priority than violent cases but often are committed by people who later graduate to more serious offenses, Stanek said.

Last year the county's crime lab got a $500,000 federal grant to test DNA samples in thousands of homicide and rape cases dating to 1991. The crime lab's success has won recognition outside Minnesota, including recent preliminary international certification, Stanek said.

The only public forensic labs in the state belong to the BCA and Hennepin County. Another crime lab will open in the new public safety building nearing completion in Anoka County, which will share the lab with neighboring Sherburne and Wright counties.

Stanek estimated that a joint city-county crime lab would cost between $15 million and $30 million.

If formed, the task force would be expected to issue a report on its findings by March.