Nebraska State Patrol Crime Lab FY2024 DNA Capacity Enhancement and Backlog Reduction Program

The Nebraska State Patrol Crime Lab (NSPCL) is a division of the Nebraska State Patrol. The NSPCL is responsible for analyzing evidence associated with criminal investigations for all state and local law enforcement agencies in the state of Nebraska. The NSPCL is accredited by the American National Standards Institute National Accreditation Board to International Organization for Standardization/International Electrotechnical Commission 17025:2017. In addition, the NSPCL is mandated by state law to provide for DNA analysis on DNA samples collected from all convicted felony and certain qualifying misdemeanor offenders. The NSPCL is responsible for storing and maintaining the resultant profiles in the Nebraska Data Bank.

The federal funding from this award will be used to achieve the following goals: reduce the backlog of forensic biology/DNA cases through the funding of five forensic scientists positions dedicated to casework; maintain the current turnaround time and backlog free status of DNA database samples through the continued funding of the forensic scientist responsible for performing database operations; provide continuing education to DNA forensic scientists as required by the accrediting bodies; and upgrade GeneMapper ID-X data analysis software for analyzing casework and convicted offender data.

With the funding made available through this project, the NSPCL expects to analyze 720 to 900 cases, reduce the turnaround time of forensic cases to less than three months, and maintain the no backlog status in the database section. This will be done while increasing the ability of the NSPCL to process samples routinely seen in casework today.