Transcripts of the Attorney General's Initiative on DNA Laboratory Backlogs (AGID-LAB) Working Group

Tuesday, October 22, 2002

ADDRESSING THE SHORTAGE OF QUALIFIED LABORATORY ANALYSTS

MR. SCHMITT: Let's move now to the third numbered paragraph on this topic, and despite what we all might eventually hope the automation would get us, we will always need human beings to do some aspect of the laboratory work, and you've all told us time and time again that there simply aren't enough people well trained or who will come work for a government entity for a long enough period of time to help you reduce the backlog.

So we wanted to have a discussion as to what can we do in the short and near term to fix the lack of qualified laboratory analysts. The recommendation that we had drafted just as again a stepping off point is a program that would bring in short-term, less than 24-month visiting scientists to work in the laboratories. This could be a DOJ funded initiative. A group of individual states could collaborate with appropriate associations to try to identify those people, a sort of scholarship program, if you will, or a fellowship program.

Let me throw that out there, and maybe we were just taking the wrong tack entirely. Maybe it's just scholarships to universities to develop the right kind of folks. What do you all think?

MR. FERRARA: Paul Ferrara on a soapbox. We've said early on in this meeting and in previous meetings and the Commission on the Future of DNA Evidence and everything else that reduction of backlogs of convicted offender samples is a lot easier problem to solve than the backlog of crime scene evidence, and I think that's a given. We've also said that automation, robotics, streamlining operations, and training are all critical functions. We've talked about undergraduate, graduate academic programs, some of the work of NSFTC, but the fundamental problem that concerns me as a forensic science laboratory director - and Kevin alluded to this issue - is that there is a disconnect from the time when somebody gets a bachelor's degree - to pick Lee in Virginia, somebody goes through the Virginia Commonwealth University program or any program, gets a bachelor's of science degree in forensic science or biology or any of the natural sciences. Typically they then complete a master's program in forensic science.

At that point they are least one year in a working laboratory on the job before they become effective examiners. It's as simple as that. I keep telling our universities don't let these kids think the idea that they're going to get a bachelor's degree in forensic science and go to work in a lab and start doing casework. Typically you need the advanced degree, but there is on-the-job training.

What have forensic laboratories done historically for all of these years? You get one or two positions. You hire somebody that's fresh out of school without any experience. You take your active casework examiners, and they spend a year for DNA, two years for firearms, two and a half years questioned document examiner, maybe six months for a drug chemist, et cetera, and you've hired them, you've committed to them, you're paying them a salary, and then you complete that training, certify, competency testing, and put those people to work on casework.

Now, that's all well and good, but, as Kevin alluded to, at that rate - if 100 laboratories or let's say 200 public forensic science laboratories around the United States each train two forensic scientists a year, we're nickel and diming the problem to death.

One approach - and this isn't the only approach, but one approach that we took in Virginia was the creation of this Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine where we've now trained over the last three years some 35 forensic scientists. That means taking individuals with the academic credentials, all the DAB standards, for example, educational standards for DNA analysis, and have trained them in our laboratory for a year on both major platforms used for DNA examination. We haven't been able to hire them all ourselves because I don't get that many positions, but at least I have produced for the last three years six fully qualified DNA examiners that have gone to other laboratories all over the country and are now productive case examiners. I hired three the first year myself, and within one month each of those three not only were doing casework, but they also had cold hits in actual casework.

I don't know how NIJ - how we could address funding support for institutions of this nature. Ours is one program. California has established the California Forensic Science Institute in conjunction with the LAPD and LASO Laboratories and Cal State University. We do it, of course, with other division of forensic science in Virginia and VCU. The University of Illinois at Chicago and Illinois State Police have a program. Mark Dale in New York State, the same concept. I suspect there are others around, and if I've neglected to mention them, please forgive me.

These are seminal programs which have the capability with proper funding and personnel to start pumping out for hiring by forensic science laboratories a large number of forensic scientists that are going to be needed. That 5 to 10 thousand figure, I don't think that's outrageous. In fact, it may even be an underestimation.

Our institute is a 501C3. We depend on donations. We provide an $18,000 a year stipend to a student. It's extremely hard to get into this program. This is the crem de le crem of these programs that get into this institute, and, of course, even at that point we have people wash out of that institute. How many of our laboratories have spent six months, a year training somebody only to find out that they just ain't going to cut it, and you drop them, you terminate them.

Here is an ability where you screen out all of these during those training programs. Yet my institute is dependent right now on donations. I don't believe it's eligible for NIJ grants. We actually have presented a grant proposal to the division where we would contract with our institute to provide training, but the one thing that we have not really addressed head on is how are we going to close this gap from well-educated young aspirant forensic scientists and make them fully qualified, functioning examiners in large numbers, meeting, of course, TWGED's standards and such.

If you look around, I don't know if there is such a program. I mean we did six DNA examiners a year for three years and four this year. I don't know. Probably Dave, Susan, Joe, they have probably trained two, three people. Mostly we try to recruit and hire an examiner from another laboratory that's already qualified. I mean that's great, but in the overall scheme of things -

MS. HART: You're robbing Peter to pay Paul.

MR. FERRARA: Exactly.

MS. HART: I think what I would like to do here is not look at this from what exists today that you can use as opposed to what recommendations should we be making to the Attorney General about how we see this going down in the future. I think that it seems to me based on the discussions that we have had both the last time and this one that what we're saying is that there is a need for more analysts. We need to make sure that they have a better educational program up front. We also need to make sure that they're trained with kind of on-the-job training so they can in fact do it. We need to encourage people to go into this field and remain in this field as opposed to training them and having them sucked out somewhere else, and that to me looking at how can you support that.

That's the general goal. The specifics we may not be able to flush out here today. It may be that down the road somebody will try a program that works, but the idea being I think that certainly we have a consensus in the room that that is something that needs to be done, that we need to be figuring out a way to encourage better education, on-the-job training, retention, and hiring of analysts.

Is there something else beyond that that we also need to be recommending?

MR. GIALAMAS: I just wanted to add I guess a couple of comments. One is that, like Paul's experience, our problem isn't necessarily recruiting people, getting people interested in the field. The O.J. Simpson trial and shows like CSI have revolutionized the interest in this field, so getting people attracted and coming in isn't really the problem.

It's, as Paul mentioned, that transition from education, being educated in a university environment to bringing them to practical experience. It's a huge drain on these laboratories and more so on smaller labs than it is on larger labs.

One approach that California has taken as a state is they've recently drafted some legislation in the Senate which deals with an internship program where the state will pay for someone to be an intern for a minimum of 1,500 hours, which equates to about nine or nine and a half months of full-time work. What that does is essentially the state is paying for them. There is no obligation for an agency to provide employment, but at least avails themselves to get trained in and on the job type setting, which helps close this gap between where we are.

We've seen models like this. A good example, the closest analogy to DNA is what ATF has done with their firearms examiners school, a very extensive, long-term program, several months. It takes a little more than a year I believe to complete the entire program. We had an examiner go through that program. It's typically a two-year on-the-job in-house training, and within a year we had an examiner who being fresh out the door is, quite honestly, a better examiner than some of the people we have had working in our unit for five years.

If we can develop a program like that, that would be wonderful. I think the big key is how are we going to address these huge numbers that everyone needs because we all need a high number of people, and with the influx that we will need and expect to get in forensic science, that I think is going to be the ultimate challenge, how do we address those large numbers of people getting trained in a reasonable amount of time.

MS. SAMPLES: I think another problem is that if there are these training programs, is having the laboratories, the users of the graduates of these programs, feel comfortable and confident in the product of these programs because you bring someone in and you have laboratories who will just say, well, that's all well and good, but they're going through my training program anyway. So you haven't really gained anything in terms of time saved, the time lag to where you have an independent case working analyst.

I know we've been poached from our laboratory and a laboratory has taken one of our staff members, and they still end up going through that laboratory's entire training program even though they may have been with us for two or three years. So what is going on there? Well, it's we want it done our way and our way only I think.

MS. NARVESON: One other thing I would point out is that of all the applicants we get - and these are people with a bachelor of science degree in chemistry - 50% of them wash out in the background checks. So the best bang for my buck is that I get to hire the person who passes all the background checks, and then I can participate in a program where I can send them to a training academy. That means I can keep my experienced examiners on the bench doing casework, but I can have this person that I'm paying off getting training. This way I know it's a quality person and I'm not going to have any problems. There are no misgivings on the student's part or the employee's part either.

So I would point that out as one other type of issue that needs to be addressed because I think oftentimes these people come out of forensic programs or even out of B.S. science programs and they don't recognize that to work in law enforcement and the laboratories you have to meet a very high standard.

MR. SELAVKA: I'll say it for Max. He would probably want to say it anyway. The TWGED process looked at foundational education at both the graduate and undergraduate level as well as training that occurs after initial competency, but we did find the on-the-job competency development and assessment period to be an area that was unworkable in the time frame of TWGED, and so it still remains, and maybe this is where the initiative related to this body could fill a gap, and that is the forensic institute and tradesmen's aptitude development is a place we didn't have time in TWGED to do it. The academicians didn't want to take it because education is a very different process than skills development. Laboratories, we don't have the resources in the lab to do this easily. Paul was eloquent in his point.

So there is this gap, and I think this recommendation is an excellent addition to those that you will make. How exactly to craft the language about what you want to do, I think this is pretty close actually, to have a very small group get together and make some recommendations about how to make it happen nationally and internationally needs to be done. Max would probably have good ideas even for language because we did play with it a bit in the beginning of TWGED, and then we decided we couldn't get there in the time frame that we had. Chris kept us on point, and we just knew we wouldn't get there. There may be some documentation already available to include in your recommendations.

MR. SCHMITT: If there were an institute or institutes that were developed along the lines that Paul was saying, and the lab directors had confidence in the skills, training that was going on there, would you be comfortable after you hired someone to send them off on this what is called the NIJ Institute for Forensic Skills Development for nine months and then when they came back, cut them loose in your lab or would you feel burdens from people above you to put them through your own lab's training process, al beit perhaps a smaller one?

MR. TILSTONE: The drugs academy which we ran as a pilot was put in place really to see whether this concept worked or not, and I guess the most important part at this stage is the matrix about whether it works or not, and if it does, what are the limitations to it? The main point is we're getting that information six months downstream, and that's not here yet. So want I want to say is preliminary data.

Of the students that we had the range of experience was from one, which was probably a waste of everyone's time and money, through reasonably well to very well to exceptionally well. I think it's worthwhile passing on the information about the feedback that was exceptionally well because this came from Illinois.

Illinois is one of the places that has got an established and very highly regarded training program across the globe, and they took in a number of new staff for controlled substances at the same time, and the one who - they just absolutely ranked in the value - the person who got through farther than I who went back there to begin supervised casework is now on the bench doing unsupervised casework way ahead of the people they took on at the same time and are still in school in their own in-house training program.

There are two caveats. The first one is - and someone has got to say this - the problem has got a certain degree of intractability in it because of Generation X. We saw a bit of fear of Gen X behavior in the students. They don't want to learn. They're not going into the crime lab as a career. It's a job. I've got a degree, tell me which buttons to push, give me a piece of paper to sign, and I'll be there three or four or five years, and then I'm going to move on. All the discussions we have had with everyone really support this.

The second caveat to it is that it's an extremely intensive program for everyone concerned including students. If you are going to produce an effective academy, then you have to have the laboratory teaching facilities and the accommodation facilities that will take a reasonable number of students. That's asking someone to be away from home for 12, 16 weeks before they're doing anything else, and there are a lot of pressures that come from that, which kind of make it more difficult to implement, which is a pity because one of the benefits I think to the community from the NIJ funded pilots that we're doing is at the end of it we can hand over to the community the curriculum. Here are the lesson plans, here is the program, here are the resources we require, here is what you have to purchase, and you can take that away and produce an academy. There aren't a lot of facilities out there that can take that and actually implement it. There are some.

So the issues were just to recap, yes, it does work, and the feedback from them was a valuable reference point with Illinois was it works extremely well. The second point is that any solution related to solving the current shortage of trained staff is going to suffer from the Gen X situation. The third thing is if you've got a critical mass of students in an academy, there are demands on students and the facility that provides it.

The last point I wanted to make is a very important piece of the discussions, and that's CCI. CCI in California has been doing the sort of things we've been talking about here for a very long time and I think reasonably successfully, but it might be worthwhile looking at some of the reasons why CCI has not been as successful as you might have thought to see what the lessons are that we can learn in the other places.

To go back a little bit to this whole issue, it's all very well to take 10 or 12 or 20 students and say you're going to train them, but where can you do it? If you're going to do it at one or two or three or four or five limited centers that have the facilities, then there is a cost in it, an emotional cost and a dollar cost for those people being away from their base. The paradox says if you do it at home, you're only going to do one at a time, and probably the lab which is trying to keep up with the casework anyway, there is not going to be the resources to be able to do the training. So it's a very difficult situation.

MR. GIALAMAS: Just two quick comments. One has to do with CCI. Just in case it's not known, I am on their users advisory board, and their focus of training is short-term training. It tends to be typically one-week type courses. So they have not ventured into the area of long-term training as we're talking about here in creating, so to speak, a semi-qualified DNA analyst.

My second comment, Glenn, is just to answer your specific question, as a lab manager or director, what would I do or how would I look at a program. I would want to have input and understanding of how the program operates so I am at least assured that I have confidence in the training that takes place and I know that I'm getting a reasonably qualified person out of the program.

The reality will be is you can never create a program where anyone is going to come out trained and you're just going to put them to work the week that they come back. There is always going to be some kind of a transitional process from learning the basics and mechanics that I would hope an academy like this could handle in understanding how we do things at our agency. Every agency has a different twist to an extraction method or an interpretation of procedure, how you handle mixtures.

So there is going to be integration that has to take place between this conceptual academy and the actual employment or use of their capabilities now, but we can significantly shorten that. I can do that within a few weeks, perhaps a month instead of taking the typical 12 or 18 months it takes to take someone through the entire process.

MR. KRESBACH: In a number of ways we had this years ago when the FBI was providing their four-week DNA course. Granted, four weeks is not enough time to learn all of the nuances and all the underlying theory that might be required once you actually get to the job site and take on the on-site learning requirements, how do I fill out this paperwork, how do I push the buttons in the right order for the way the system is set up where I'm going to work.

I'm thinking that with the number of academic institutions that are providing forensic training, the Forensic Resource Network integrated with some help from the FBI, that certainly a number of different locations could be provided around the country that could set up these institutes, if you will, providing training that would last anywhere from three, four months. There is still going to be that high learning curve for the local activities, but the bulk of the people I think in the laboratories that would benefit from these types of programs are going to be people that they have already hired, as Susan had indicated, and they know where they're going to go. They're not going to be sent to a program or applying for a scholarship for a program that may or may not exist for them in an employment fashion down the road.

I think that if a scholarship type of thing were available, that the scholarship should be available through the person's hiring laboratory so that they go to a program, NFSTC or the FBI or Virginia or wherever the program could be located to get that basic specific information after they've already completed that bachelor's or master's degree.

While the concept of scholarships for people that are already working on an academic program but not yet hired by an agency is nice, there are a lot of scholarships already out there. There are a lot of programs already out there. I don't think the problem in any way is trying to find or attract individuals that are interested in this work. As someone down this way said earlier, with CSI and all the other programs - that's why I went into forensics. Everyone remembers Quincy. Granted, he generally burned his fingers when he touched the gas chromatograph, but aside from that, that's how I got into it. There are plenty of people that want to do this work, whether they go into it initially as an academic program specifically towards a forensics program or they start working on a bachelor's degree in molecular biology and decide the angle or the direction that they want to go is forensics versus the private sector.

There are plenty of people out there that are going to be there. It's just a matter of can we get them specifically trained for the tasks that we have and then also get them in a cost effective manner trained so that the smaller agencies are not saddled with shutting down their casework program while they're trying to do the training.

I've rambled. I apologize.

MR. SCHMITT: No. I think that was fine. It seems as though there is consensus that the area of the gap that most needs to be addressed is this area after graduation from either a bachelor's or perhaps a master's program and before you can turn them loose unsupervised in a laboratory. It's that on-the-job training component. It also sounds to me from what other people have said and especially what John had said that the people who we think ought to go through this won't want to go through this unless they know they have a job. In other words, they would need to be hired by a Paul Ferrara or David Coffman with the understanding - and you're not committed to this - that the next thing after they're hired is they go to this thing to get their training, and the expectation that you would have is that they come back and but for some unique aspects of your lab, you know, where does this go, who is this person, you could turn them on and let them start doing casework when they get back from whatever this thing is.

It seems to me that that being the case, as far as cost sharing, it might be that we could reasonably expect that the labs would pay the person's salary because they're going to be an employee and you're going to pay them whether they're being trained by you or they're being trained by this other entity, but that the overhead cost of this entity to do this thing would not necessarily be borne by the labs. That might be the federal component. Paul, I see that you have something that you want to say.

MR. FERRARA: From our limited experience, one, when we have accepted after screening and accepted six DNA students that they're going to spend the next year in our laboratory being taught by our examiners, who incidentally are being paid supplementally to do this training, and in addition they are expected to continue doing their own casework - I mean this concept is this is no longer academia. This is the real world. This is what it is that you're going to face day in and day out and things that you have to learn.

When we finish selecting the people, the first thing we tell them is, look, there is no promise at the end of this year that you will be able to be hired by the Virginia Division of Forensic Science at any of our laboratories because I cannot guarantee from year to year how many new positions I will get. With a cadre of six examiners, I'm, quite frankly, not going to get six new examiner positions each year; however, I have said to them and the facts have borne me out that if you successfully complete thisprogram, you can write your ticket and go anywhere in this country that you want because labs like myself and all of those labs represented here are clamoring for people that are well educated and well trained on the job.

The irony here is that I lost the million and a half dollars a year of funding that I was getting from the State of Virginia because the State of Virginia said why should we give you a million and a half dollars to train people to go to other states? I felt like saying why do we have state operated universities, you know, but that was the mentality.

So fundamental in this we have found that the students - I mean the biggest problem is struggling on an $18,000 or a $20,000 stipend, but typically these kids have gone - they've got a bachelor's degree, a master's degree, and all you're doing is asking them to spend one more year. It's a residency. It's an in-service program. If they're going to be professional, you almost have to have that expectation. If you're going to specialize in medicine, you're going to serve a residency, and it's going to be a difficult period. Perhaps when you complete that residency, you would like to stay in that particular hospital or you say I am now going to pick up my marbles and go somewhere else.

What I'm talking about is a source of fully qualified examiners that laboratories all over the country can draw on without having to have hired somebody that you don't know anything about I mean except for an interview process and then send them off someplace else to be taught and you're paying the salary. I mean if I hire somebody in Virginia as a forensic scientist trainee, we're paying about $35,000 a year. That's $35,000 a year out of my budget for a nonproductive individual for a year to say nothing of the much greater costs that I'm losing in terms of my own manpower. I would love to have some other institution around that I could hire the people directly from, and there isn't any, so I had to create our own.

MS. HART: I'm just kicking this around because I'm trying to figure this out, and it strikes me that there are a couple of common themes that I hear here. One is you need this extra training in a setting outside of the lab because you can train a larger number of people with a smaller - it's more cost effective to do it than the one-on-one training in the lab. You do a certain amount of training outside of the lab here. You need to reserve that training for people who could pass background checks even if they're not hired now. In many ways local or state hiring freezes impair your ability to commit a job to that person before they get the training down the road. People are also reluctant to fund these if they can't be guaranteed to get the people at the back end.

Hypothetically what if there was a situation like this where there was some sort of institute or whatever which was funded by - if their graduates were hired with this training, the states would reimburse them or pay back what was the cost of that training to that university to help self-fund it? So the people who are actually doing the hiring and getting the benefit of it were the ones that were paying belatedly for the training. Is that at all workable? Is there some sort of idea like that that's worth thinking about or kicking around with other people to look at that? You do have this problem with everybody being reluctant to commit their funds to it because they're not going to necessarily be the beneficiaries of it down the road. You can say this is a bad idea, folks.

MR. FERRARA: No. I'm trying to digest that and thinking out of the box. Offhand I would be certainly willing to reimburse my institute the $20,000 as a bonus, as it were, an extra expense in exchange for hiring a fully qualified examiner who, again, meets each and every requirement of CODIS and ASCLD-LAB and competency testing. A $20,000 bonus for having somebody fully qualified, that's still a deal.

I don't know how I would do it mechanically within the state government. That would throw them for a loop, I know, but conceptually there is some merit there.

MS. HART: I also wonder about whether with flexibility over some of the crime lab improvement stuff whether additional flexibility here would help encourage that. I think this is something that I would like to try and think of down the road, how to do it, and I'm sure we will be calling on some of you to further perhaps develop this concept, but I think that some of the ideas, the common theme here is that we've got some people with some impediments to the training because people can't commit the funds up front without a guarantee they're going to get people and how do we perhaps work around that so that the people who actually are hiring the people are the ones paying for the training even belatedly. So I look forward to further ideas on this.

MS. NARVESON: Just more comment. I think that what we've heard is there are a number of institutes that exist right now, and the ones that were named actually cover various regions of the country. The other thing that we've seen is that it's very difficult to get people to relocate. So very likely someone trained in Paul's institute probably would not be overly anxious to move out of the eastern corridor and move to Arizona; however, someone trained in California might be very interested because that's familiar territory to them and they may have family. What we're seeing with this Generation X is they like to stay close to the family, so I would definitely support regionalization of these institutes if that is looked to.

MR. SCHMITT: Any more thoughts on this point?

MR. BUTLER: I think what we've heard, too, is you need to have - there is definitely going to be training for core competencies like how to use genome typing software or extract, things you wouldn't learn necessarily in school, but then there is the polishing, if you will, of what is needed in the individual laboratory.

So I think what needs to be done as well as laboratories have to define how they could break those things up. If they could define and say, well, we can get training, the core competency training from somewhere else, from another institute, but these are the actual tasks that they need to have refined in our laboratory.

Individual labs have to do that. I don't know how you would get all of the information back, but you could then here is what the core competencies are. Here is what we use as the curriculum for a facility or an institute.

MR. SCHMITT: I think that's a good idea. I'm reminded, as John mentioned, of kind of the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center model here where the majority of federal law enforcement agents go to one place. There is one curriculum. It's a core curriculum, if you will, that has been developed by a board on which are representatives from all the different federal law enforcement agencies which send its people to that place.

After you complete this course then there is often one, two, or four weeks of follow-on training at your individual law enforcement agency, sometimes in that same location; sometimes in their own training center or someplace else, but they've all decided here are the basic skill sets that a federal law enforcement agent needs to have, and it works just fine. That's I think really what you're saying, John.

Any other thoughts on this?

MR. SIGEL: One more comment to the tail end of this process. There is the accreditation process for those labs that are accredited that they must have a competency testing within their own system before they put an examiner on, whether they be through a training program such as this or hired from another laboratory, but there is not a requirement by the accreditation program that it has to be full-fledged training.

So something about Carl's comment about the extension of the TWGED emphasis on the educational program, a similar type concept for the training aspect that we're talking about could assist that transition to reduce that amount of time in the individual laboratories.