Award Information
Description of original award (Fiscal Year 2017, $891,341)
The New Jersey State Police (NJSP), Office of Forensic Sciences (OFS) maintains five forensic laboratories, which service over eight million people living in New Jersey. The system is comprised of four facilities: the Hamilton Technology Complex which houses the Central Regional and DNA Laboratories, and the North, East and South Regional Laboratories.
The Hamilton Technology Complex is a full service State laboratory and is responsible for analyzing evidential material associated with criminal investigations (including DNA analysis of the 20 core loci), and analysis of convicted offender and arrestee samples for entry into the State and National Combined DNA Index System.
The four regional laboratories provide drug and toxicology analysis and three of the regionals (South, East, and Central) provide arson analysis services and are responsible for taking in potential forensic biology cases. The overtime provided by this grant will give the OFS DNA Laboratory the additional time to perform DNA analysis on over 700 cases from its backlog and upload the resultant DNA profiles generated into CODIS.
Funding provided for training will enable four analysts to attend the Fall 2019 Promega meeting, four analysts to attend the 2019 Bode East meeting, two staff members to a ttend the 2019 CODIS Conferences and two analysts to attend the 2019 Green Mountain DNA conference.
Funding provided for equipment will increase the capacity of the DNA laboratory to physically analyze samples in the laboratory as well as data analysis of the samples to generate reports for our customer agencies.
It is expected that funding from the FY2017 DNA CEBR grant will result in increased overall capacity and efficiency of DNA analysis and reduce the current backlog in the OFS DNA Laboratory.
nca/ncf