The San Francisco Police Department will close its scandal-marred
drug lab permanently and use outside testers to analyze narcotics
evidence, Police Chief George Gascón said Wednesday.
"We have determined that we would be better served" by having independent laboratories test seized substances to determine if they are drugs, Gascón said at a news conference.
That will enable the Police Department's crime lab at Hunters Point to focus on testing of weapons and DNA evidence, areas that are "quite frankly of greater importance to our crime-fighting efforts," Gascón said.
The department shut down the drug analysis section of the crime lab March 9 amid an investigation into whether now-retired technician Deborah Madden skimmed powdered cocaine and OxyContin evidence.
Prosecutors have dismissed more than 600 cases since the scandal broke. Madden, 60, has not been charged with a crime in connection with the case, but a police investigation is under way.
Police supervision
Gascón said the drug testing done by private labs would be conducted under "our supervision." The Police Department still would be responsible for ensuring that the lab work meets legal standards.
"We will still control that process," the chief said.
The drug analysis section was already a headache for the Police Department even before the narcotics-skimming scandal became known. It was down to two civilian police technicians before Madden left in December, and outside auditors found that the section was not properly supervised, evidence was not well secured and problems with its scales were not being documented correctly.
The chief said an outside lab can perform testing for about $100 per sample. By having police officers themselves do some preliminary tests, Gascón believes that the 14,000 tests that the drug analysis section had performed annually an be cut to around 4,000 at outside labs.
Gascón said the preliminary tests that officers have already started doing are accepted by prosecutors to support the filing of charges.
"It's a more strategic approach to what we test," said Assistant Chief Jeff Godown, whom Gascón directed in March to oversee the crime lab.
