With staff cuts due to the city's financial crisis, the Los Angeles Police Department's Latent Print Section now has a backlog of 3,000 cases for burglaries and property crimes and has been limiting how many fingerprints it processes each month.
Commanding Officer Yvette Burney told the City Council's Public Safety Committee on Friday that unless more staff is hired the backlog will grow.
Burney said the division has shrunk from 96 civilian positions to 69 and also is required to take furlough days off to help balance the city's budget.
As a result, she said, the division has had to limit the number of prints it can process.
"We ask each division to give us their top 10 crimes and we process those," Burney said.
Councilman Mitch Englander, who chairs the committee, asked Burney to return with more details as well as whether there can be some changes to the training program -- it now requires five years training -- to bring in some help to the division.
"We have to tear this apart to see what can be done to change what we're doing," Englander said. "We know that property crimes can lead to other more serious crimes and processing them now can prevent future problems.
"Plus, we have realignment (of state prisons) and these people are coming out of jail and going back to what they know, which is crime."
Councilman Dennis Zine said it also is frustrating for the crime victims.
"We send people out
to take prints and then we don't do anything with them," Zine said. "People call up the detectives and ask them what's been going on with their case and the detectives have no answer for them.
"They see these TV shows on how crimes are solved and they wonder why we can't do the same thing," Zine said.
Englander said he wanted a full report back within a month on ways to deal with the problem.
Copyright 2012 - Daily News, Los Angeles
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
