The D.C. Council voted Tuesday to keep duties of the city’s embattled crime lab independent of the D.C. police, rejecting Mayor Muriel Bowser’s budget proposal that would’ve transferred the lab’s crime scene sciences division to the Metropolitan Police Department.

The council voted unanimously on the measure in the form of an amendment to the Budget Support Act, marking the council’s final vote on the  Fiscal Year 2024 budget. The decision ends, for now, a long back-and-forth between the council and the executive branch regarding the future of the crime lab, which has been without accreditation since 2021.

In her 2024 fiscal year budget, Bowser wanted to move the crime scene sciences division, the branch of the Department of Forensic Science responsible for collecting, processing, analyzing, and preserving crime scene evidence, under the purview of the Metropolitan Police Department. The transfer (which also amounted to a $10 million reduction in the crime lab’s budget) was intended to allow DFS to focus on regaining accreditation. The lab lost its accreditation more than two years ago, amid concerns over inaccuracies and compromised prosecutions, and has been essentially outsourcing much of its work to private and federal labs since.

The proposal drew pushback from councilmembers and criminal justice advocates, who warned that giving police oversight of evidence-gathering compromised investigations and increased the risk of wrongful convictions and miscarriages of justice — the very things that DFS was designed to avoid. The city first opened the crime lab nearly a decade ago, following a damning report from the National Academies of Sciences that highlighted the lack of scientific standards and bias concerns in forensics analysis across the nation. The creation of DFS as an entity separate from a prosecutor or police department was intended to preserve the scientific integrity of evidence gathering, collection, and analysis.

Yet in the decade since its creation, DFS has been beset by high-profile errors, inaccuracies, and a lack of transparency that culminated in the loss of its accreditation in 2021. It’s not set to regain accreditation until 2024 at the earliest.

The council’s vote Tuesday keeps the crime scene sciences division out of MPD hands and under the power of DFS — at least until lawmakers come up with another solution for the beleaguered lab.

During budget discussions this spring, Ward 2 Councilmember and chair of the Judiciary and Public Safety Committee Brooke Pinto originally proposed that the council temporarily follow Bowser’s plan. Her committee’s budget markup maintained moving the crime scene sciences division under MPD but only until the end of the 2024 fiscal year, at which point DFS would hopefully be re-accredited. Her colleagues on the council — namely Ward 6 councilmember and former Judiciary chair Charles Allen and Ward 4’s Janeese Lewis George — pushed back against that idea. Lewis George, a former prosecutor at the D.C. Attorney General’s office, called the move a “terrible decision” that would lead to more dismissed cases. Allen characterized the plan as a step backward, given that the city is already playing catch-up on retested evidence.

The council’s budget vote essentially maintains the status quo at the lab as it climbs back toward accreditation, although it’s unclear what next steps they may take in changing the lab’s operations.

A bill passed by the council unanimously last year would move DFS out from the Mayor’s oversight completely and make it an independent agency (similar to the D.C. Board of Elections) but it has yet to receive funding. The bill’s author, Charles Allen, expressed disappointment in the Council’s decision not to implement his legislation Tuesday. He argued that DFS issues run system-wide and cannot be solved while the agency operates under the executive branch — and by extension, the police department.

“[DFS] itself improperly understands its role in the criminal justice system,” he said at Tuesday’s vote. “DFS is not a so-called crime lab, it’s a science lab. The executive’s frame is based in public safety, naturally, and it should be. But that frame is distorted when it’s applied to science; it forces DFS to become uncomfortably close with law enforcement and the prosecution rather than remain neutral and science-based.”

Allen’s critiques align with those of forensics experts and the National Academies of Sciences. As Dr. Heidi Elridge told DCist/WAMU earlier this year, a crime lab operating within a police department may subconsciously adhere to the motivations and goals of a department (such as making convictions or closing cases) at the expense of scientific objectivity.

“We want to always have a very open mind when we’re doing crime scene analysis and laboratory evaluations; the concern is that if you’re working for the police agency, it might be harder to keep that open objective mind,” she said.

Allen urged the council to continue working on a solution going forward, to which Chairman Phil Mendelson agreed.