Mayor Muriel Bowser’s proposed 2024 budget, unveiled before the D.C. Council last week, contains broad proposed cuts to city services prompted by an uncertain financial outlook. But one change, some officials say, would also undermine the independence of one of the city’s struggling agencies.

The Department of Forensic Sciences is responsible for testing, analyzing, and preserving evidence from crime scenes, as well monitoring emerging drug trends. DFS also manages the city’s public health lab, which tests samples for toxins and infectious disease monitoring. It’s a troubled agency that lost its accreditation in 2021 amid concerns over accuracy and compromised prosecutions — and has essentially been outsourcing its work since.

The city opened the $210 million department more than a decade ago as a means to reduce the city’s reliance on law enforcement when it came to analyzing and storing evidence. Bowser’s proposed budget, however, would move the lab’s Crime Scene Science Division — responsible for collecting, processing, analyzing, and preserving crime scene evidence — under the purview of the Metropolitan Police Department, seemingly in opposition to the original point of the crime lab.

The transfer amounts to a more than $10 million reduction in the crime lab’s budget, and moves more than 80 employees from DFS to MPD. The budget also proposes moving the Public Health Laboratory under the control of DC Health.

In a small detail, the budget proposal act also includes a provision to amend the 2011 legislation that established DFS. Under Bowser’s new legislation, the definition of the lab would be changed from an “independent agency within the executive branch,”  to “a subordinate agency within the executive branch,” suggesting a narrowing of the lab’s independence.

Asked this week if her proposal was the result of eroding trust in DFS and its attempts to get its accreditation back, Bowser gave a short response: “I’m not losing faith, but we are recommending with this budget, changes to some of the structure of the work that DFS does.”

City Administrator Kevin Donahue, taking questions at a press conference about the change last week, said he would “frame these changes as allowing DFS to focus on their core work in getting back to accreditation, for the scientific work around looking at evidence collected at crime scenes.”

Donahue also stressed that many of the duties transferred to MPD in the budget actually belonged to the police department in the first place.

Bowser’s budget legislation states that MPD may gather evidence at crime scenes and provide training on the collection and preservation of forensic evidence. The police department would also oversee digital forensics (which includes information found on phones or computers), firearms tests, and forensic photography. Per Donahue, these tasks from the Crime Scene Science Division were MPD’s until just a few years ago, when they moved over to DFS. At DFS, these duties were meant to be carried out by civilian — not law enforcement — scientists, according to the DFS website. But Donahue said that due to staffing levels, MPD was still supplementing that work.

“Even since that transfer, MPD has always had to supplement that staffing level often with trained or reserve officers … to collect crime scene [evidence],” he said. “That’s going back to MPD, which is where it had been a few years ago.”

D.C. Auditor Kathy Patterson, who published a report in December claiming the crime lab had failed to operate with independence, said the language tweak doesn’t change much.

“As long as the[director] is named by the mayor, the agency isn’t independent [anyway],” Patterson said in an interview with DCist/WAMU.

Bowser’s budget is at odds with a new law, which she let pass without her signature early this year. The legislation, introduced by former Judiciary Committee chair Charles Allen, overhauls the crime lab, making it an independent agency and moving it completely outside of the executive branch. The bill also restructures the agency’s advisory board, and increases oversight of negligence, misconduct, and other testing errors. (Notably, it requires that the advisory board make certain investigations into mishandled evidence public.) It’s unclear how the current budget proposal may thwart the legislation, which is slated to take effect without the mayor’s signature in May.

The potential changes come nearly two years into a messy saga for the crime lab, which lost its accreditation in April 2021 over concerns about accuracy of analysis and alleged attempts to cover up mistakes. During a D.C. Council oversight hearing last month, DFS interim director Anthony Crispino told Judiciary and Public Safety Committee Chair Brooke Pinto that the lab was on track to resubmit an accreditation application in spring or summer 2023. Realistically, this means the lab wouldn’t receive accreditation until early 2024, he projected.

In the years since losing its national stamp of approval, confidence has waned in DFS’ ability to fix itself. Reports and investigations have continued to turn up issue after issue at the crime lab, and the department has largely relying on outside contractors to process evidence samples. In addition to jeopardizing cases, the mess has cost the city more a million dollars, Crispino has said.

The crime lab is already relying on MPD for digital evidence processing, interim director Crispino told lawmakers during the oversight hearing earlier this year — a decision made collectively with stakeholders, including the United States Attorney’s Office for D.C. Pinto, at the time, expressed concern about MPD’s involvement in evidence processing, and worried that more units might move back under MPD.

“It’s my understanding that the whole reason in standing up DFS 10 years ago, was because of the MPD’s evidence collection services and the concerns about having an impermissible risk of bias or the appearance of bias,” she said during the hearing. “And so I’m wondering why that same risk is not now present, 10 years later?”

Pinto tells DCist/WAMU her committee will be looking at the proposal closely as it marks up the mayor’s budget. On Wednesday, March 29, she will be hosting a budget oversight meeting with interim director Crispino, where she’ll be looking for updates on the accredition timeline, and an explanation about the proposal to move functions under MPD.

“I am concerned — there’s a reason that these services are provided and offered under a separate agency,” Pinto said of Bowser’s changes. “It is important that there is a level of independence for the folks who are coming to the crime scene, collecting evidence, and testing that evidence.”

Patterson said when it comes to crime scene investigation, there will always be collaboration between police and a crime lab, but that DFS was supposed to independently take on the forensics work of evidence technicians. The plan to create DFS years ago came after a National Academy of Sciences report listed an independent evidence lab among its best practices.

“The notion was to have an independent set of scientists saying, ‘here, this is what the facts are,'” she said. “If you take what it supposed to be an objective, scientific, fact-based operation and move that back to the law enforcement/prosecution side, then that would seem to go against what has been determined to be best practices.”

D.C. Council Chair Phil Mendelson tells DCist/WAMU that he’s not in favor of the mayor’s proposal. “I don’t think it’s a good idea. We worked hard for several years to get the crime scene investigation transferred from MPD to the Forensic lab,” Mendelson said in a statement. “The Mayor says she’s making this transfer so that the lab can focus on accreditation. I think that’s a completely tangential argument that doesn’t hold up. I don’t see what value is added with this proposal by the Mayor, and am inclined not to support it.”

Councilmembers met with the mayor and the executive branch on Friday for a hearing to ask questions about her budget proposal; they will have the next two months to review the proposal and make changes. Ward 5 Councilmember Zachary Parker questioned how adding additional responsibilities to MPD makes sense given MPD’s staffing shortage, but Bowser emphasized that the employees will be coming from DFS — not additional hires.

Even before losing its accreditation in 2021, the crime lab had found itself in trouble for years. In 2015, the U.S. Attorney’s office stopped sending evidence to the lab, due to errors in DNA analysis. Bowser commissioned an audit in response, which concluded that the lab’s DNA testing procedures were “insufficient and inadequate.” This led the national accrediting board to order a pause on the lab’s DNA casework. Then, in 2020, D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine flagged issues with the lab’s firearm processing, linked to a case in which the lab had erroneously tied two D.C. murders to the same gun. Prosecutors within the U.S. Attorney’s Office reviewed more cases and identified additional discrepancies with conclusions that the crime lab’s experts had reached. This sparked uncertainty, leading prosecutors to question the evidence they had relied on in dozens of cases.

Given the numerous issues, the D.C. Office of the Inspector General opened a criminal probe into the lab in March, 2021. This included allegations that in addition to the poor evidence processing, managers at DFS had pressured examiners to cover up mistakes, potentially compromising prosecutors’ cases. The next month, the ANSI National Accreditation Board pulled its accreditation of the lab, and it’s been without one since. Jenifer Smith, the former director of the lab, resigned in May 2021 amid mounting pressure for leadership change from D.C. lawmakers.

This story has been updated with a statement from Councilmember Brooke Pinto.

Previously: 
D.C.’s Troubled Crime Lab Won’t Be Accredited Until At Least 2024
New Audit Delivers Another Blow To D.C.’s Embattled Forensics Lab
D.C.’s De-Accredited Crime Lab Could Be Made An Independent Agency
Troubled DC Crime Lab Loses Its Accreditation