Since the passing of the Rapid DNA Act in 2017, the FBI has been working toward ensuring the technology reaches its highest potential. In a virtual presentation during the 31st annual ISHI conference, Douglas Hares, the Rapid DNA Implementation Program Advisor for the FBI, revealed the federal agency has taken a significant step forward—they conducted booking station pilot programs in four states and turned the lessons learned into a Standards and Procedure document approved by the FBI director last month.
The FBI has been invested in Rapid DNA in the booking station since the beginning. In this scenario, buccal swabs are taken from arrestees at the booking station and run through a Rapid DNA machine. The immediate results allow the arrestee’s DNA profile to be entered into CODIS and searched against “watchlisted” DNA profiles from unsolved crimes within minutes. Within 24-hours, the arrestee’s profile has been searched against CODIS at both the state and national levels.
The booking station pilots, conducted in January and February 2020, took place in Arizona, Florida, Louisiana and Texas. Importantly, these states are among the 21 that allow DNA collection of arrestees of booking. Some states do not allow DNA collection until there is probable cause, or not at all, making them poor candidates for Rapid DNA during the booking process.
According to Hares, three main lessons were learned during the pilot programs—1) there was an 83 percent success rate for the analyzed samples, 2) information technology (IT) is more critical that realized, and 3) everything needs to be automated and electronic.
The 83 percent success rate highlights the need for investigators to take an additional swab in case Rapid DNA does not work, or if the laboratory needs to run a re-test for an unrelated reason. The booking pilots also reinforced the need for all requirements to be automated and electronic, including fingerprints and qualifying offense, so no human intervention is needed during the analysis process. Lastly, Hares mentioned the key role of IT at least three times throughout his presentation.
“IT is huge. You’ve got to have the right folks involved in this process,” he said. “I can’t stress enough the importance of the IT integration here, and how the integration between fingerprint processing and getting to CODIS requires IT involvement at the earliest stages because there might be changes needed to get the right information from the criminal history, and that’s really critical for this to work.”
Ultimately, seven standards were included in the Standards for the Operation of Rapid DNA Booking Systems by Law Enforcement Booking Agencies. They cover everything from scope, power requirements of the booking system, lead operator/operator duties, training, security and data protection, sample control, audits and more. The first standard sets the stage for the state CODIS agency being the lead agency for Rapid DNA in the state.
“The state CODIS agency owns the data associated with Rapid DNA and the booking environment. Law enforcement cannot keep a copy of that data in a separate database,” Hares explained.
Since known reference samples are taken directly from an individual during booking station Rapid DNA analysis, we know there is sufficient amounts of DNA and that there are no mixed profiles that would require a human scientist to interpret. Those are the attributes that define a perfect Rapid DNA situation. They are also the exact opposite of what is usually found at a crime scene.
At this time, the forensic community agrees crime scene samples analyzed with Rapid DNA instrumentation should not be eligible for upload and/or searching in CODIS or NDIS. Of course, that doesn’t mean they won’t be in the future.
In fact, the FBI’s Rapid DNA Crime Scene Technology Advancement Task Group is working with the Scientific Working Group on DNA Analysis Methods (SWGDAM) to ultimately create, test and approve Expert Systems for crime scene DNA samples from more than one individual. Together with their European partner, ENFSI, they have identified five major areas that must be addressed before considering the use of Rapid DNA in forensic casework:
- Integrated positive controls to identify low quality and degradation
- Ability to export analyzable raw data
- Expert System programmed with rules to accurately flag allele calls in both single source and mixture DNA, requiring analyst intervention
- Improved peak height ratio balance (per locus and across loci)
- Developmental validation on a wide variety of forensic evidence-type samples commonly encountered, including mixture, sensitivity and stochastic studies involving the extraction process
“We’re going to continue to monitor the technology developments, design experiments to test thee advancements once they are done, and we’re going to continue our collaborations with SWGDAM and ENFSI because we’re all in this together and we all want Rapid DNA to be the best it can be,” Hares concluded.