STATE SHOULD FUND MSSU CRIME LAB

The Missouri State Highway Patrol's crime laboratory in Jefferson City
needs help. The backlog of 5,000 cases is making it "impossible to keep
up," according to the lab director. The lag time on those cases can run
from three months to a year.

Springfield wants the patrol's satellite crime lab there expanded and moved
into a building being purchased by the city. Currently, the Springfield lab
does drug chemistries and blood alcohol testing, but not DNA tests, blood
toxicology or ballistics.

Relief is necessary if the Jefferson City lab is to complete in a timely
manner the many thousands of tests required to process cases quickly and
efficiently through the state's criminal justice system. Much of the logjam
can be attributed to Missouri's meth problem, which has figuratively --
and, at times, literally -- exploded in recent years.

The solution being proposed by Springfield makes sense. But so, too, does
asking the state to take over funding of the Missouri Southern State
University crime lab, which compiled an enviable record of turning around
evidence in a little over two months. That turnaround is the fastest among
the state's regional crime labs.

Missouri Southern's lab has been a valuable asset for 30 years for regional
law enforcement agencies in processing criminal evidence as well as for
training officers in forensic science. But the MSSU lab was seriously hurt
when the city of Joplin -- unwisely, we believe -- decided to withdraw its
financial support and send evidence to the state's laboratory system. The
city saved less than $100,000 annually while adding 800 or so local cases
to the Highway Patrol's backlog.

The city of Joplin should re-establish its working relationship with the
MSSU crime lab, at least until the Legislature has the opportunity to
consider picking up the lab's costs. Meanwhile, state funding for the
regional crime labs, including Missouri Southern's, should be given a
priority in the new session.

If the Jefferson City laboratory is already buried beneath 5,000 cases,
adding even more cases makes no sense. In the long run, better funding for
Southern's lab could expedite the handling of evidence and speed up the
disposition of cases.