IAPE Evidence Blog

States News Ser­vice
BYLINE: States News Ser­vice
DATELINE: ST. THOMAS, VI 

St. Croix, Vir­gin Islands

The fol­low­ing infor­ma­tion was released by the Vir­gin Islands Police Department:

Com­mis­sioner Nov­elle E. Fran­cis, Jr. show­cased the VI Police Department’s new crime analy­sis and evi­dence stor­age facil­ity on Wednes­day, July 21. The facil­ity is “unmatched any­where in the Caribbean,” accord­ing to St. Croix Deputy Chief Christo­pher How­ell . Gov­er­nor John de Jongh , St. Croix Police Chief Oak­land Benta , foren­sic detec­tives and a slew of media accom­pa­nied Fran­cis and How­ell on the walk through. 

Access to the 6,000 square foot facil­ity is gained through bio­met­ric fin­ger­print scan. All unau­tho­rized fin­ger­prints are recorded and any attempt by unau­tho­rized per­sons to access the facil­ity will be inves­ti­gated. A closed cam­era sys­tem mon­i­tors all access points and all sec­tions of the facil­ity. Inside, sep­a­rate rooms are des­ig­nated for bal­lis­tic test­ing and trac­ing, rais­ing oblit­er­ated ser­ial num­bers off firearms, rais­ing latent fin­ger­prints off evi­dence, fin­ger­print analy­sis and pro­cess­ing and stor­ing evi­dence. To pre­serve evi­dence that needs to be refrig­er­ated there are two indus­trial grade units which sound an alarm if the tem­per­a­ture goes below a cer­tain level. Bio­met­ric scans are required to access each sec­tion and in the case of the most secure vault, two per­sons simul­ta­ne­ously must enter parts of a code to gain access.

The facil­ity was bud­geted $500k and will be com­pleted at least 100k under bud­get said How­ell, who’s hands-on approach in over­see­ing the ren­o­va­tions, equip­ment pur­chas­ing and final set up was the dri­ving force behind the com­ple­tion of the crime lab. Work on the facil­ity began 14 months ago and is sched­uled to be com­pleted in about three months. A sim­i­lar project is under­way on St. Thomas and is just a few months behind. That facil­ity was also funded at 50K.

The ren­o­va­tion cor­rects 30 years of prob­lems in evi­dence stor­age and brings the depart­ment into the fore­front of crime scene inves­ti­ga­tion tech­nol­ogy. The US Inte­rior Depart­ment con­ducted three audits in the last 20 years detail­ing prob­lems and out­lin­ing rec­om­men­da­tions to cor­rect the issues. Three for­mer com­mis­sion­ers called for the audits, hop­ing to get the sup­port to make the changes.

The facil­ity con­forms to stan­dards set by the Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence (IAPE). Accord­ing to the IAPE web­site, “adher­ing to these stan­dards should assure any agency that rea­son­able steps have been taken to obtain a secure and effi­cient prop­erty and evi­dence man­age­ment system.”

Com­mis­sioner Fran­cis said, under the de Jongh admin­is­tra­tion, the funds were allo­cated and the work finally began.

“Within the police depart­ment I made sure this project remained a pri­or­ity. This project will go a long way to increase pub­lic trust in the police depart­ment, now that we have a mod­ern crime lab and evi­dence stor­age capa­bil­i­ties,” Com­mis­sioner Fran­cis said.

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