D.C.’s Department of Forensic Science, which has been without accreditation since 2021, may finally regain it as early as January 2024, according to Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau.

After a site visit on Thursday, Nadeau announced that the agency had filed for reaccreditation in September and requested a fast-track review. Three days of on-site visits will need to take place in December by the accrediting body, ANSI National Accreditation Board. It could then take two to six weeks for the accreditation to come through, should the inspection not turn up any errors. The inspection may, depending on what ANSI concludes, require additional follow-ups or adjustments, according to a spokesperson for Nadeau, but based on the current timeline, DFS could regain accreditation as early as January. (A DFS spokesperson did not immediately return DCist/WAMU’s request for comment.)

It’s a huge development for D.C.’s embattled crime lab — which handles the preservation and analysis of forensic evidence —  and for public safety in the city more broadly.

DFS lost its accreditation in April 2021 over accuracy concerns (including errors in DNA analyses), compromised prosecutions, and a lack of transparency. The city first opened the lab in 2012 as a means to divorce scientific evidence gathering and processing from police work, theoretically avoiding bias and wrongful convictions; but in the decade following its creation, the lab was often beset by errors. Without accreditation, the city has been outsourcing much of its evidence-processing work to federal and private labs.

Certain crime lab responsibilities, like photographic forensic evidence, have been carried out by members of the Metropolitan Police Department over the past two years, but the lack of a functioning crime lab has hampered the city’s ability to swiftly close or prosecute cases, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for D.C., which prosecutes most serious adult crimes in the city. As violent crime — particularly gun violence — has increased over the year, officials have frequently pointed to the city’s essentially non-functioning crime lab as one of the gaps in the “public safety ecosystem” that’s preventing D.C. from driving down crime rates.

“This is not the only fix, but it’s a critical fix,” Nadeau said in her statement on the crime lab’s hopeful path toward accreditation.

In her fiscal year 2024 budget proposal, Mayor Muriel Bowser tried to move DFS’ crime scene science division under the control of the Metropolitan Police Department. She said the move would free up DFS to focus on reaccreditation. Her proposal received pushback from councilmembers, who argued it defeated the purpose of an independent crime lab. Ward 2 councilmember and judiciary committee chair Brooke Pinto tried to strike a compromise with a proposal to move the crime scene science division under MPD for just a year, at which point DFS would hopefully be reaccredited, but her measure ultimately failed to make it into the council’s final Budget Support Act. 

Even if the lab gains reaccreditation, it may still face a staffing problem. In a public safety bill earlier this week, Robert White introduced a provision aimed at beefing up the number of forensic scientists so cops aren’t supplementing that work. The bill would create a $5,000 retention and recruitment incentive for the crime scene science division within DFS, and would also require annual reports on hiring and retention.