I'm writing this without having current statistics, just knowledge from previous information. When a crime is committed in a large city, there a resources in place to process the crime scene, pay for the evidence to be ran through a forensics lab, computer techs to take info out of electronics, etc. The cost of having these specialties available costs money. In large cities, there is more crime, and more opportunity to utilize these tools. Small towns, poor counties don't have these tools available to them. Every police officer is trained in crime scene/evidence collection, but if a town only sees a murder every 6 years that doesn't offer very much practice to the officers. The cost of sending evidence to an independent lab is high. There is a backlog of evidence waiting to be processed. At this time I'm not even sure how the independent labs decide which evidence is run first. It could be first come, first serve. Or there could be monetary based decisions, or they at the lab have a triage of sorts to separate cases into priority. The people in these independent labs are not the ones that collected it, and I do not know if they testify in court as expert witnesses or not. I do know there is no national database of unsolved crimes or murders. Some states have databases. What I would like to offer is teams of crime scene techs who would travel upon request of a department to the scene and process it. Taking all microscopic evidence with them back to the lab to process. The process would be free to the department or possibly a flat fee that is reasonable. The question is would police departments utilize this if they had it available to them?
This idea is exciting to me. Wish I had the funds to get your training and your equipment!
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