IAPE Evidence Blog

www.emporiagazette.com
Link to Arti­cle
BYLINE: Emer­son Lynn Jr.

Kansas

Should Kansas leg­is­la­tors be charged with mur­der because they failed to give law enforce­ment offi­cials the infor­ma­tion they needed to stop a mur­derer before he killed?

Silly ques­tion.

Still, in mid-September, the Kansas Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tion had a back­log of 38,000 sam­ples from those who had been arrested for felonies await­ing test­ing. The DNA pro­files had not been made and recorded because the KBI lab­o­ra­tory is that understaffed.

Which brings us back to the Leg­is­la­ture. The lab is under­staffed because the KBI bud­get has been cut to the bone. Law­mak­ers say they cut the bud­get because the money isn’t there.

The money isn’t there because it hasn’t been raised. It is the sworn duty of the state’s rep­re­sen­ta­tives and sen­a­tors to levy suf­fi­cient taxes to gov­ern the state well. By refus­ing to pro­vide the KBI enough money to do DNA test­ing, leg­is­la­tors have shirked that duty.

The rea­son for cre­at­ing DNA pro­files on those arrested for felonies is to give law enforce­ment the tools it needs to take DNA from the scene of a crime and check it against the state’s col­lec­tion of pro­files taken from a group of rea­son­able sus­pects. When a match is found an arrest can be made and soci­ety can be pro­tected against a poten­tially dan­ger­ous person.

With­hold­ing the funds needed to bet­ter pro­tect Kansans isn’t a crime. But it is another exam­ple of the false economies our elected rep­re­sen­ta­tives are mak­ing in deal­ing with the recession.

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Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence
“Law Enforce­ment Serv­ing the Needs of Law Enforce­ment”
www.IAPE.org