Title
Paul Coverdell Forensic Science Improvement Grants Program (NB)
This item involves requesting $69,224 in grant funds from the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, National Institute of Justice for funding of the Gainesville Police Department's Forensic Crime Unit for fiscal year 2009.
Explanation
The Forensic Crime Unit is housed within the Criminal Investigations Division. The purpose of the Forensic Crime Unit is to process major crime scenes within the City of Gainesville and to analyze fingerprint evidence from these crime scenes. Currently the Forensic Crime Unit employs two full time latent fingerprint examiners. The latent fingerprint examiners have a backlog of approximately 6 months. This backlog was addressed with a Paul Coverdell Forensic Science Improvement Grant awarded for fiscal year 2007and was substantially but not completely diminished. Grant monies sought will be used to purchase enhancements to the AFIX purchased with the previous award. The AFIX is an automated system that compares arrest palm prints of known offenders to unknown latent palm prints found at crime scenes. Enhancements sought will include using a private company to complete the AFIX database to date, adding additional memory to the database and funding an electronic link to the jail so future arrest prints can be transferred to the database more easily. It will also be used to temporarily employ, for the duration of the grant period, one part time fingerprint technician to assist the latent examiners. Funding will also be requested for advanced photography equipment, and advanced scanning and printing equipment to develop photographs taken of latent impressions left at crime scenes that cannot currently be captured with detail sufficient to compare to known offenders. Additionally, funding will be requested for some overtime to develop the best practice to employ this new equipment. We will also ask for funding for advanced training....
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