FY2023 Paul Coverdell Forensic Science Improvement Grants Program - Formula

South Dakota intends to utilize the award to help with the foundation of improving the lab services, updating lab spaces to better benefit our employees and customers, maintaining education requirements, and updating necessary laboratory software. The SDFL provides services to all law enforcement in South Dakota, including local, state, federal, and tribal law enforcement. This year, our laboratory hopes to utilize this award to obtain additional equipment to include a specialized crime lite and imaging system for fingerprints, UV lights to assist our reduce possible contamination issues with evidence containers utilized for storage, the addition of new lab exam tables as labs have been renovated to make more room for new processes, examiners and updated lab spaces and finally to update our broken evidence storage lockers that are unreliable for use in their current state. 

Money has previously been procured to make updates to the evidence section.  Replacing the current evidence lockers with updated options to include a refrigerated locker option to follow best practice for different evidence types will allow us to provide more evidence delivery options for the many rural agencies or agencies submitting evidence after hours. These funds would support yearly supply purchases for recently updated equipment in the fingerprint section and also would support purchasing additional computers, updating barcode label printers and monitors and printer/scanner system for a new examiner desk set up. Finally, Coverdell funding would be used for the annual maintenance for our BEAST LIMS system, update our CODIS database backup software and additional licenses for our LIMS system for newly acquired laboratory examiners.