.Body of Evidence

When bad things happen in Oakland, Rachelle Vinson winds up with the proof. Vinson is the property supervisor for the Oakland Police Department, and her basement warehouse is packed from floor to sixteen-foot ceiling with the detritus of Oaklanders’ most felonious moments. Her office is the final resting place for countless samples of blood, bone, hair, and tissue, for thousands of weapons and the narcotics, jewelry, and currency that may have been used to obtain them, for the tattered clothing and personal effects of those who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Tiny and ponytailed, Vinson hardly looks like the curator for a hall of horrors, but after twenty years on the job, she regards the parade of grotesqueries that pass through her supervision with the dry demeanor of one who can no longer be surprised. As she puts it, “Whatever you can imagine, you can’t.”

Vinson’s property room is the last stop evidence makes as it travels through Oakland’s police system. Some has been on the shelves for decades; Vinson still maintains materials from unsolved homicides that go all the way back to 1954. And more arrives every day. With each passing year the criminal justice system relies more heavily on the DNA clues extracted from evidence to clinch cases, and legislators keep passing laws that require evidence to be preserved for longer periods of time. Within the last two years alone, the legislature has increased the statute of limitations for sexual assaults, expanded the list of crimes for which DNA samples must be taken, and allowed convicted felons to request DNA tests to exonerate themselves. All of this means that evidence, including fragile biological evidence such as blood and other fluids, must be kept in pristine condition for increasingly long periods of time, awaiting the day when, years or even decades down the line, it may be called back to the lab or court to determine who goes free or to jail.

The extraordinarily long period for which evidence must now be stored raises some troubling questions: What about contamination, or what if it simply degrades with age? After all, genetic analysis is such a relatively new science that nobody’s even sure what the usable shelf-life of DNA might be. And with such a huge amount of data to process, law enforcement agencies face an uphill battle to get the data from new crimes analyzed on time, not to mention the evidence from cases that have been sitting in the basement for years.

Although California’s Department of Justice has made enormous strides catching up its once-shameful backlog of unprocessed DNA samples, local police departments such as the OPD are still struggling to wade through hundreds of unsolved cases. It’s serious business; such samples can send dangerous criminals to prison or exonerate the unjustly accused. Vinson’s basement, and dozens of other California property rooms just like it, is the place where the idea that no evidence should be thrown away until the last appeal is exhausted smacks up against the limitations of the physical world, where freezer space is expensive and eventually you run out of shelves. “It’s crowded,” says Vinson of the basement, “and it’s only gotten crowdeder.” She pauses, looking around at the towers of neatly marked boxes of evidence that stretch far above her head. “That’s not a real word. More crowded. Lots of crowded. Too much crowding. Overcrowded.”

But the OPD’s storage problem is not simply a matter of needing to find a bigger storage space — it’s indicative of a whole system of evidence collection and analysis that is becoming dangerously overextended.Every day, evidence technicians such as Lee Smith rove the city in their black-and-white vans, waiting to be called to crime scenes where they will bag and tag the physical proof of man’s inhumanity to man. As he drives to his first crime scene of the week, Smith’s van is full of equipment that clatters in the back: Fingerprint lift cards and their accompanying envelopes; brown paper lunch bags and grocery bags for wrapping clothing and firearms; empty film canisters for packaging shell casings and expended slugs; report forms; disposable latex gloves; a tool box full of screwdrivers, saw blades, and pry bars; a fingerprint kit; cameras; and film. Although the broad outlines of an evidence tech’s job have changed little over the years — dusting for fingerprints, collecting blood and other samples, taking photographs, and drawing diagrams — the precision with which evidence can be analyzed has increased tremendously. The growing sensitivity of crime scene science means that techs have a tougher job to do. An errant sneeze, an ungloved hand, or sloppy packaging can render a sample useless. If a defense attorney can argue that evidence has been tainted or tampered with, or if it ever strayed from the chain of custody, techs might as well give the suspect a get-out-of-jail-free card. Property and evidence folks still wince when someone says “O.J.”

Smith has been an evidence technician for seventeen years, and he’s built a reputation as deliberate and thoughtful. As with most of the crime scenes he visits, all Smith knows about this one comes from the terse police code that came over the radio. “It was originally coded as an assault, now with a deadly weapon, so it could be anything,” he says. “And the officer has already requested the district sergeant, which is an indication of the level of severity.” When he rolls up to the scene — an apartment complex near downtown Oakland — five squad cars, two ambulances, and a fire truck already are there. Before his van is even in park, Smith grabs a camera from behind his seat and, as soon as the vehicle stops moving, he flies from the driver’s seat. Inside one of the ambulances, paramedics are cutting the jeans off of a thin, pale man lying motionless on a gurney; Smith vaults inside and begins snapping pictures of the man’s injuries. Head trauma and an injured hand, he reports, emerging before the ambulance speeds away. He pops a few photos of the building, then crowds into an elevator full of police and shaken residents.

Inside, it’s hard not to overhear people’s theories about the assault, but like most techs, Smith would prefer to scan the scene first before formulating his own. Unlike regular officers, evidence techs usually don’t conduct interviews with witnesses, and some assiduously avoid them. After all, memory is faulty. “Ninety-nine times out of one hundred, that’s not what happened,” agrees Smith’s boss, Officer Dan Hutchinson, coordinator of the evidence technical detail, who has joined the crowd in the hallway. “I would rather go out and look at the scene and the physical evidence, and I don’t even want to know what they say because it may prejudice my thinking. People will make mistakes, people will lie intentionally, but the evidence isn’t going to lie.”

In this case, it’s not too hard to divine what happened. The door to one apartment lies halfway open; behind it are the remnants of a scuffle — an overturned fish tank, a painting torn from the wall, a computer monitor knocked from its base. Two short plywood planks lie on the floor, both with reddish stains. There are flecks of blood on the doorway and more blood on the floor; a trail of droplets leads down the hallway to a neighbor’s apartment, where the injured man apparently ran for refuge. The scene inside the second apartment is considerably more gory; there are bloodstains on the walls and a larger pool of blood on the yellow kitchen linoleum where eventually the man was treated by paramedics. The trail is easy to follow: fight, flight, and collapse.

Smith stands back from the crowd of officers, just watching, not even snapping pictures. He makes a brief foray into the second apartment and stands there, head cocked, smelling the air. “Bleach,” he says. Then he goes to peer at the bloodstain over the stove. “It’s rich, arterial.” As a crush of residents and building workers arrives, eager to soothe witnesses and start steam-cleaning the blood out of the hallway carpet, Smith returns to the first apartment and gingerly tours the wrecked living room.

Meanwhile, Hutchinson, an OPD officer for sixteen years, is examining the flecks of blood left on the victim’s door frame. If Eskimos have a myriad of names for snow, evidence techs have a dozen different names for blood, differentiated by the ways it falls or the type of trauma that produced it. A gruesome mess reads like a map to them. A bloodstain can reveal where people were positioned and how they moved through the room; it can hint at the weapons used; it can expose individuals claiming to act in self-defense who really were aggressors. Photographs of blood spatter can be a crucial prosecutorial tool, giving a jury a picture of what happened at a crime scene.

Smith reappears a few minutes later, still not ready to start shooting and measuring. “In the immortal words of retired tech coordinator Pete Pruitt, two of the best tools that a technician has are these,” he says, pointing to his eyes. One of the things he’s noticed on his tour is that there appears to be a second weapon lying on a steamer chest not too far from the plywood boards. It’s a sap, a short baton of woven leather filled with buckshot or small rocks, most often used as a bludgeoning device. Whether or not it was the primary weapon is one of the few remaining ambiguities, since police already have a confessed suspect in custody and there is little question as to whose blood has been spilled. Since most of what remains to be done is the tedious work of measuring and bagging evidence and filling out paperwork, Smith stays to do the documentation and Hutchinson takes off in his own cluttered van.

Mondays usually are busy for techs. The majority of Oakland’s rapes and homicides occur on weekends, keeping techs so occupied that evidence collection for lower-priority property crimes gets pushed back to the beginning of the week. Weekday calls during the morning shift tend to be property crimes such as burglaries and bank robberies. But today is an exception. Not long after leaving the assault scene, Hutchinson gets a call for an attempted shooting at an intersection in West Oakland. By the time he pulls up, the ambulance has come and gone, and the theories are flying fast and thick about exactly what happened.

Yellow police tape is looped across a half dozen squad cars, and crowds have gathered at both ends. Inside the cordoned area, a burgundy sedan lies crumpled where it crashed into a chain-link fence. The car has two bullet holes, one in the trunk and one near the driver-side rearview mirror. Police officers are using folded paper cards weighted down with coins to mark where they found 9 mm shell casings and, farther up the block, another 9 mm casing and a few live .25 caliber rounds. Both the evidence and the cards seem in danger of blowing away in the gentle breeze, so a police officer marks their locations with yellow chalk circles.

Smith has beaten Hutchinson to the scene, which he’s busy measuring off with a rolling ruler known as a stroll meter. He looks put-upon. “Basically I have a crime scene that’s 200 feet long, which is kind of agonizing,” he says. “We like nice tidy little scenes, but this happens.” Slowly, a scenario emerges. Oily skid marks on the sidewalk and gouge marks in the curb show where the driver made a panicky sudden turn. A blown-out tire and a deep line etched in the street by the bare rim of his front wheel show why he crashed into the fence. The presence of live bullets leads the techs to think that one of the shooters’ guns jammed. A small quantity of marijuana in the car may indicate that the suspect knew his attackers, whom Hutchinson thinks may very well be “the West Oakland Collection Agency,” from a previous drug deal. The victim’s wounds — banged-up knees and a small laceration on his head — are not from gunshots but the crash.

Still, there are questions, especially since the suspects didn’t leave behind much fingerprintable evidence. Who were the shooters? Where are the weapons they used? Where did the shooting start? Were the suspects on foot or in a car? Witnesses say they saw two suspects leave by hailing a passing car, but Hutchinson has his doubts. He thinks the first shot — the one that spooked the driver and caused him to swerve up onto the sidewalk — was the one that hit the trunk of his car, so it came from directly behind, and most likely was fired from inside another car. Plus, he thinks the shooting actually started a block or two away, and doubts that a person on foot could have run fast enough to catch up with the pursued car and fire another series of shots at it. “I think the shooting starts way up there,” he says, gesturing toward a freeway overpass a few blocks away, “so we’re going to take a walk northbound and see if we can’t find the shell casing.”

Hutchinson slowly walks the length of three city blocks, kicking aside garbage, checking gutters and behind the wheels of parked cars, but with no luck. If there really were additional shots fired, proof could be hard to come by. Traffic could have dislodged the casing, or it could have gotten stuck in the treads of an emergency vehicle or even the sole of an officer’s boot. And if Hutchinson is right about the shots being fired from inside a car, the casings could still be there. After searching the street twice, Hutchinson gives up. “A lot of what we do is like looking for a needle in a haystack,” he says.On the sixth-floor crime lab in the Oakland police building — the next stop for evidence in the OPD’s chain of command — Anthony Camacho also is searching for the elusive or invisible. Camacho is a seventeen-year veteran of the criminalistics department, and his specialty is latent fingerprints. Spread out in front of him are three firearms — a five-shot revolver, a 9 mm automatic, and an Intertech assault pistol — as well their corresponding magazines and a tarnished copper cylinder he thinks is a homemade silencer. The items before him were seized from the personal arsenal of a suspect who had been arrested a few days previously after he shot at a police officer. Bullets from each of the guns lie beside their corresponding firearm, neatly tied together with loops of thread and coated with the faint purply pink residue of a fluorescent powder that Camacho uses to make fingerprints easier to see.

Techs such as Smith and Hutchinson frequently take fingerprints in the field by “throwing powder” — brushing old-fashioned black carbon powder onto a surface, lifting the print off with a piece of transparent tape, and attaching the resulting print to a paper card. Generally, they take prints off of surfaces that can’t be sent back to the lab — automobiles, windows, refrigerators. But when they need a print off of something that can be bagged, they send it to Camacho.

Camacho has fingerprinted just about everything imaginable, from bank robbery holdup notes to Hefty bags used for corpse disposal. But unfortunately, as he looks at the array of weaponry in front of him, he has to admit that the odds of getting a clean print off a gun aren’t very good — nubby grips and rust-resistant finishes repel fingerprints, which are mostly just moisture. “The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms did a study on processing firearms and they found that they would recover identifiable prints from less than ten percent of their cases,” he says. “I’ve found in my work that it’s probably more like eight percent. Just to give you an idea on bullets, after seventeen years of doing this, I think I’ve only gotten prints in five different cases and I’ve done thousands and thousands of bullets. With casings, after the bullet has already been fired, I’ve never gotten an identifiable print and I don’t know anybody who has.” Fingerprints, it turns out, are relatively delicate and dependent on the weather. If it’s too hot, they evaporate. If it’s too cold, people don’t perspire enough to leave good prints. Crime scenes are not usually riddled with identifiable prints, the way they are on television.

When Camacho gets a print, he takes a photograph and sends the results to criminalist Jessica Salter. Matching crime scene fingerprints to an individual’s print record is an exacting task, one Salter performs with two large magnifying eyepieces. Salter searches for the tiny identifying points that differentiate one person’s prints from another’s — places where ridges separate, reconnect, or branch off in different directions. If a copy of the suspect’s prints isn’t readily available — or if there is no known suspect at all — Salter can try to make a match by computer. The Alameda and Contra Costa county database has seven million sets of prints to search through. If there’s no match, the OPD can also tap into a statewide Department of Justice database which contains another 125 million print sets.

Modern forensic science owes a great deal to a nineteenth-century French crime lab director named Dr. Edmond Locard who pioneered a simple but revolutionary idea: Everyone who walks into a room leaves a little bit of themselves there, and when they leave, they take little bit of the room with them. In other words, there can be no truly perfect crime; by virtue of being corporeal, every criminal must leave clues behind. “Wherever he steps, whatever he touches, whatever he leaves, even unconsciously, will serve as a silent witness against him,” Locard wrote in 1877. “Not only his fingerprints or his footprints, but his hair, the fibers from his clothes, the glass he breaks, the tool mark he leaves, the paint he scratches, the blood or semen he deposits or collects. … All of these and more bear mute witness against him. This is evidence that does not forget. It is not confused by the excitement of the moment. It is not absent because human witnesses are. It is factual evidence. Physical evidence cannot be wrong, it cannot perjure itself, it cannot be wholly absent. Only its interpretation can err. Only human failure to find it, study and understand it, can diminish its value.”

Little did Locard know how well advancing technology would bear him out, that one day some of the most powerful testimony against criminals would come from the nuclei of their own cells. The impact DNA analysis has had on the legal system is hard to exaggerate — it has both sent people to prison and released the falsely accused from it. And fingerprints are considered more accurate biometric identifiers than even DNA — after all, identical twins have the same genes, but different fingerprints.

Unlike fingerprints, which either match a suspect or don’t, DNA profiling simply reveals whether or not a suspect can be included in the population of people who could have been present at a crime scene. When blood typing was the state of the art, criminalists often could do no better than to say that a suspect had a certain blood type — if the blood was type O, that could be forty percent of the world’s population. But with genetic matching, the precision has grown to one person out of hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of people, says Jennifer Mihalovich, the head of the OPD’s DNA unit. The list of testable biologicals also has expanded far beyond blood and semen to bone, teeth, microscopic bits of skin, saliva from where attackers kissed or bit their victims, even the crushed fragment of a contact lens. “We are able to work with smaller and smaller stains,” she says. “We are able to work with samples that we were never able to work with previously — the gunk on your eyeglasses, the necklace around your neck that gets torn off during the struggle, hair roots. If you drink out of a soda can, we can work with your DNA.” Both DNA profiling and fingerprinting are more time-consuming than they appear to be in the movies and on television. (“CSI would be a very boring show if it took them eight weeks to get a DNA typing result,” says Mihalovich dryly.) In fact, DNA typing can take up to twelve weeks. Camacho estimates that he usually can only get through eight to twelve cases a month. Both criminalists are experiencing a glut of evidence to process; Mihalovich says the OPD has a backlog of about 500 samples going all the way back to 1994, Camacho says his backlog is about 300 samples.

Police departments are facing increasing government pressure to analyze — and eventually house — vast numbers of samples. Perhaps the most well-known development is the “Burton bill,” which took effect this January. Named for its sponsor, Senate President Pro Tem John Burton (D – San Francisco), SB 1342 allows California inmates to request post-conviction DNA testing if they believe it will exonerate them. The law specifies that biological materials relating to the inmate’s case must be preserved as long as that person remains incarcerated. As of April, the state already had received more than 1,886 requests for testing to prove innocence. And while many criminalists applaud the bill’s intentions, they see trouble ahead. “Unfortunately, that law on the books does not give the public crime laboratories more staffing, and that’s a real problem, because there aren’t that many forensic scientists, and there aren’t that many forensic scientists who do DNA,” says OPD criminalistics lab supervisor Tom Abercrombie, who spent seven years working for the Berkeley lab where the state’s databank of DNA profiles is stored. “If we’re asked to do the same type of work that we’ve been doing for years with staffing that’s probably less than adequate and now the caseload is increased, it will cause more and more slow-ups in the criminal justice system.”

Two other recent laws have expanded the workload for crime labs. Last year’s AB 2814, sponsored by Assemblyman Mike Machado (D – Linden), was designed to help the state crack down on people who commit serial violent felonies. Previously, only genetic profiles from convicted offenders could be included in the state’s DNA databank. Machado’s law allows DNA samples to be taken from suspects, with files to be purged within two years if they are not subsequently convicted. And AB 673, sponsored by Assemblywoman Carole Migden (D – San Francisco), adds burglary, robbery, carjacking, and arson to the list of violent felonies — rape, murder, attempted murder, voluntary manslaughter, domestic violence, kidnapping, child molestation, mayhem, and torture — for which convicts must provide DNA samples. Once again, that means more sampling, analysis, and storage.

The ultimate point of all this sampling is to feed enough profiles into the state’s databank that it can begin to score matches, or “cold hits,” between DNA taken from previously unsolved crimes and samples from known offenders. Cold hits have the potential to eliminate redundancies within the criminal justice system; often the person responsible for multiple unsolved cases already is imprisoned on an unrelated charge. They also can turn up new suspects in cases where the trail of evidence had long gone cold. In one notable California case, a cold hit led to the exoneration of Kevin Green, a man imprisoned for sixteen years for a murder he did not commit. Green had been found guilty of raping and murdering his wife in 1979; it was not until 1996 that DNA testing matched materials taken from the scene — as well as five other murders — to Gerald Parker, a man who had been in and out of lockup throughout the ’80s on various sexual assault and kidnapping charges.

Despite having the largest prison population in the nation, California has made very few cold hits, and the status of its DNA profiling program has been a sore point with Attorney General Bill Lockyer. When he took office in 1999, it was right on the heels of an embarrassing San Francisco Chronicle exposé of the Berkeley lab’s backlog — an estimated 115,000 unanalyzed samples — that was slowing up the process of matching felons to unsolved cases. Even worse, the Chron claimed that the state had released as many as 200,000 convicted felons from prison without first collecting a DNA sample. The numbers spoke for themselves: Even though the state had established a DNA databank in 1994, at that point it had only cracked eleven cold cases. Compared with states such as Virginia, which has successfully resolved over 400 old cases, California was lagging behind.

Lockyer vowed to bring the databank up to speed by July 2001, and sank $10 million into hiring new lab personnel, $50 million into processing previously untested evidence collected in rape kits, and helped secure a $1.5 million federal grant for California’s Cold Hit program. This June, the lab announced that it had processed all of its samples a month ahead of schedule, and that the number of profiles in the database now totaled 200,000.

Between the Machado bill and the updating of the Berkeley database, state officials say California is finally processing samples fast enough to start cracking cases. Since the databank was established in 1994, 61 suspects from previously unsolved crimes have been identified; forty of those identifications have happened this year. “Right now we’re only touching the tip of the iceberg,” says Manuel Valencia, a spokesman for Lockyer’s office.

The state’s focus on cold hits also is partially intended to deal with unsolved sexual assault cases. A law enforcement rule of thumb is that career criminals often start with property crimes and work toward progressively more violent offenses. “When our lab made cold hits matching those samples to unsolved crimes, 40 percent of the offenders had at least one prior burglary, and 34 percent had at least one prior robbery conviction, yet at the time they didn’t qualify for inclusion in these databanks,” Valencia says. “If we had been able to do then what we can do now, we most likely would have been able to catch them before they committed some of these sexual offenses.”

But while the state’s database is finally caught up, local police forces are still overloaded. The OPD is planning to devote four scientists to clearing its backlog of DNA evidence from sexual assault cases, three of whom are funded through a state grant as part of the Cold Hit program. They expect to finish by the time the grant expires in October 2003, although they admit it won’t be easy.

And in the meantime, they’re running out of freezer space for all the samples.

At this time of year, Vinson’s property and evidence department in the bottom level of the Oakland police administration building is tricked out in honor of the season, with cotton cobwebbing, crepe paper bats and spiders, and streamers of yellow plastic tape that look like police line but cheerfully announce “Beware! Enter if you dare!” Of course, the contents of the property department are pretty spooky year round. “Whatever you can imagine is here, and things that your mind would never imagine are also here,” says Vinson. “We’ve had eyeballs, we have fetuses, we’ve got ears, we’ve had a penis, we’ve gotten skulls, we’ve got Grandma in her urn which I delivered to the coroner’s office. We’ve got everything that you could never imagine, and it goes forever.”

Oakland is a city with a high crime rate, so there’s lots of evidence to collect, and advancing technologies such as DNA profiling have vastly increased the number and type of samples worth saving. Vinson has eighteen rows of towering shelves for evidence that doesn’t need to be frozen or refrigerated, and it’s not nearly enough. There are extra piles of boxes stacked at the end of each row, and Vinson practically glows when she talks about how tomorrow a truck is supposed to come by to pick up some particularly bulky items, mostly electronics, that have been cleared for disposal and will now be sold at auction.

But most of the evidence isn’t going anywhere soon, and it’s been packed into boxes and envelopes, hundreds of items to a shelf. There are kitchen forks and knives, stacks of baseball bats, and piles of bolt cutters. There is a box filled with swords and golf clubs. There are hard drives seized from counterfeiters and pornographers. There are boxes of bootlegged videocassettes and CDs. There are hammers, crowbars, hacksaws, and car jacks; an electric drill, an electric iron, and a digital scale. There are envelopes full of credit cards, and envelope after envelope of crack pipes. There’s a wheelchair and a baby’s car seat, a shopping cart and a whole row of automobile tires. There is a Hot Wheels scooter. There is a pink plastic kiddie pool. There is a picket sign that says “Dioxin Equals Death.”

Special rooms house certain kinds of evidence: a double-doored vault for currency, a walk-in refrigerator for blood samples and rape kits, a room packed with firearms. When the property room was built in 1964, optimistic designers built only four wooden gun racks, assuming the department would never need to house more than a few dozen weapons at a time. Now the room’s contents could arm a militia; the ceiling-high shelves house row after row of handguns packaged in manila envelopes, longer rifles are stacked high four to a cardboard box, and a few grocery carts contain arms caches seized from one individual. “We destroy anywhere from 1,500 to 3,000 guns a year and we can’t stay ahead of it,” says Vinson.

By far the most overwhelming part of the room is the area where the OPD keeps items associated with rape or murder scenes — mostly clothes and bedding — that contain blood, semen, or some other fluid that could contain telltale DNA evidence. The packages are neatly labeled and wrapped tightly in brown paper (biologicals stored in plastic tend to mold) and if you didn’t know what was inside them, this dark corridor could easily be mistaken for some forgotten postal service back room. Except for the smell. If hell had a dead-letter office, this would be it. “People die and when they die they usually urinate, defecate, barf, or bleed, and things smell,” says Vinson matter-of-factly. “It has its own particular odor. There are times when we all go like this,” she says, shielding her face, “and we all run. Then we cry and we have to go barf, or we have to get the fans out. Sometimes it takes two people, one each holding their nose and using one hand individually to get something packaged or moved or stored.”

Violent felonies not only generate gory evidence, but huge quantities of it. The evidence sent to the property room from a single sexual assault can include rape kits, DNA samples, clothing, and bedding. “If there was a weapon used and they inserted it in the nooks and crannies, that stays also,” Vinson says. “If it was in a vehicle and they removed the seat or the seat covers, then that stays with us. If, God forbid, they were on a piece of furniture, then that stays with us.”

Since California currently has no statute of limitations for homicides, evidence collected in murder cases must be kept until the convicted person is put to death, exonerated, or their sentence is commuted. With the lengthiness of the appeals process, and prisoners often sitting on Death Row for decades, property clerks can end up storing evidence for twenty or thirty years. Last year the state also extended the statute of limitations for sexual assaults from six years to as many as ten, meaning that evidence from those crimes will also have to be kept longer. And what about all those inmates demanding DNA testing? Vinson eyes the Burton bill with apprehension. “If it doesn’t get appealed in 2003,” she says bluntly, “we’re screwed.”

For all the state’s interest in acquiring more and more biological evidence, few attempts have been made to mitigate the new legislation’s strain on crime labs and property warehouses. The most notable promise of help from the state was Proposition 15, which appeared on the March 2000 ballot and was promptly rejected by California voters. Proposing to spend $220 million to replace outdated equipment, expand office space, and improve facilities for DNA analysis, Prop. 15 lost with slightly less than half the vote. It was the only bond measure to fail that season and one of the only crime-prevention initiatives in recent California history to be voted down by the state’s notoriously pro-law-and-order residents, leading some to speculate that the public didn’t understand what crime labs do.

Meanwhile, the Oakland Police Administration building is getting old, and the criminalists are nearly as packed in as the evidence they study. The sixth-floor criminalistics lab was originally built to accommodate four people; the staff is now at fourteen. Sergeant Robert Stewart, who spent nine years as an evidence tech and is now in charge of facilities development for the OPD, estimates that in order to efficiently handle the amount of work requests the lab gets, they actually should have 34 staffers. And there are other signs that, at 43 years old, the building is past its prime: The electricity demand is too much for the building, the mechanical systems are wearing out — even the thick, pale blue paint on the walls, which must once have seemed sprightly, is now drab and murky. “We’re a has-been building,” Stewart admits.

On the local level, some relief is at hand. By May 2002, the OPD hopes to complete construction on a new facility near its current substation at the Eastmont Mall. Although the OPD will still maintain its basement property office and sixth-floor criminalistics lab in the downtown building, many of its techs will get to move into elaborate new digs, with features far beyond what they have now: vehicle bays with hydraulic lifts, a drying closet for airing out evidence, a large evidence room capable of handling even bulky items such as fenders, doors, and truck tires; identification labs for fingerprinting, impression analysis, and photographic comparison; foot-operated sinks; and vent hoods for chemical storage and fingerprinting so techs don’t have to inhale black carbon powder. “It will be like we’ve died and gone to heaven,” predicts Hutchinson. And in about thirty months, the OPD hopes to break ground on another major project — an entirely new 50,000-square-foot police building.

Providing better facilities to evidence technicians is an important tool in helping the police reduce the crime rate, but the fact remains that as long as there are felons, finding new ways to track them down will remain a growth industry. And until California voters and legislators get as excited about funding the back end of police work as they are about putting more people in jail and keeping them there for longer periods of time, the basement will only get more crowded. Every day, the black-and-white tech vans come back with more of the physical remnants of human misery. It’s hard not to think about the police building’s original designers, who never dreamed that the property officer would need to store more than four racks’ worth of seized weapons. If we build a bigger — and a better — crime lab, how long will it take for us to fill that one up, too?