Award Information
Description of original award (Fiscal Year 2017, $150,000)
The Tri County Regional Forensic Laboratory provides forensic science service in the areas of Biology/DNA, Latent Prints, Drug Chemistry, and Toxicology for all the law enforcement agencies within the Minnesota counties of Anoka, Sherburne, and Wright.
the laboratory proposes to use funding from this award to purchase and implement a comprehensive robotic workstation that will perform extractions, quantification set-up, normalizations, and amplification set-up with minimal user input. Validated systems are currently in use in many labs across the US and other countries. Several vendors have products geared specifically to the forensic market.
In 2016, the Biology section received 1,726 new requests for service compared to 1,363 new requests in 2015 representing an increase of 27%. The Biology section was affected by a huge increase in crimes against persons in 2016. Death Investigation/Homicide cases increased by 126%, and Criminal Sexual Conduct cases increased by 54%. Possible increases in submission could result from the current trend of increased submission of sexual assault kits due to the widespread publicity of the problem of un-submitted kits. The Biology section ended the year with an average turn-around time on DNA requests for service of 63 days.
The primary goal of the project is to reduce the time required to complete a DNA request for service. Automating as much of the DNA testing process as possible will allow analysts to more effectively process expedited, time sensitive requests. The goal of this project is to reduce request completion turnaround by ~10-20% (13-26 days using current request completion data).
nca/ncf