Crime Lab Needs To Upgrade

taken from this site

By Jeanette L. Andrade, The Manila Times Reporter

If you marvel at the state-of-the-art equipment in the television series CSI, you’ll hang your head in shame over the dismal state of the facilities in the Philippine National Police’s Crime Laboratory Service (CLS).

CLS director Chief Superintendent Ernesto Belen, however, has news for you. The equipment shown on the popular TV series may be breathtakingly sophisticated, he said, but it does not exist. Even the crime labs in the US and other industrialized countries do not have them.

He admitted to being a fan of the series, but his attitude changed when he assumed his current post and started asking possible donors for the equipment. It came as a big letdown for him to learn that either the investigation tools are not yet available for distribution or they haven’t been made yet.

Belen spoke of his discovery at the weekly Talakayan sa Isyung Pulis (TSIP) forum.
"Take the DNA [deoxyribonucleic acid] examination shown," he said. "A sample is placed in a tube, and the result comes out after the tube is made to spin. The equipment or the process does not exist yet."

‘Only in the movies’
An FBI attaché replied, "Only in the movies," when asked where he could get that kind of equipment for the PNP crime lab.

Belen said the CSI exaggerates things for "cinematic effect." But he acknowledged the valuable service the series provides to create "awareness of how forensics works."

As for the CSI "overall criminalists," Belen and his men concluded after some quick computation that a crime operative can gain the experience for such exceptional capability after a long study.

"If he starts right out of college," he noted, "such a criminalist will be at least 55 years old by the time he has gone through the various fields of science and achieve the ability to conduct autopsies, discern chemical analysis results, and identify bugs for forensic entomology. And that leaves him only a year of service before retirement."

Still, Belen acknowledged that the crime lab equipment his men use is years behind those in First-World countries. He said that about the only modern gadget the PNP has is the automated fingerprint identification system. There certainly is a need to upgrade the tools of detection, but delay in the release of funds is a big problem.

"We pay for the equipment in dollars or in euros," he pointed out. "By the time the fund allocation is approved, the foreign-currency rate has changed."