Fiscal Year 2013-2015 Special Budget Meeting

The Bratton Group team suspects that a good deal of time and energy is being wasted by technicians to process scenes that will never be further investigated or to process scenes of less importance instead of scenes where physical evidence might be of greater use to investigators. In addition, the technicians have no real advocate in the Department, for needed equipment or policy changes, other than the coordinator whose status as a police officer limits his influence. The evidence technician unit is being transferred to the Central Investigation Division. The Bratton Group team recommends that the Department use the occasion of the transfer to revise systematically the management of the evidence technicians, appointing a genuine supervisor, preferably a sergeant, and establishing a systematic dispatch protocol that both prioritizes and tracks all crime scene runs. The evidence technician supervisor would coordinate with the DIU sergeants in the five districts to help establish priorities on which scenes should processed and which scenes should be processed first. Coordinating the DIUs with Centralized CID The establishment of District Investigation Units will result in some reconfiguration of the Criminal Investigations Division (CID). As already mentioned in this memo, the Bratton Group team recommends that the Major Crimes Section 1 significantly reduce the scope its investigations, to focusing on homicides and assault cases that have resulted in grave injury and in which the victim is likely to die, with the gun assault or shooting cases assigned to the DIUs. Likewise, much of the workload for what is now Major Case Section 2 would also move to the DIUs. Although the DIU sergeants would report and work closely with the district captains, the Bratton Group team recommends that they also have a reporting requirement to a designated lieutenant in CID. This CID lieutenant would schedule weekly meetings with the DIU sergeants from the local districts to discuss current cases and compare notes about pattern crimes and trends. This meeting would help bring to light any robbery or burglary patterns that are spanning two or more districts and any The Bratton Group, LLC 11