The New Orleans crime lab is facing a major backlog of DNA samples gathered from various crime. Around 73,000 await processing, collected over years of investigations.
UNO professor Skip Gallagher says it is a daunting situation.
"New Orleans has somewhere in the area of 4,500 violent crimes in the last year," Gallagher told WWL's Newell Normand. "Every single one of those, which has DNA present, should be processed, and unfortunately, what we sent to the crime lab last year was somewhere over 700 samples, out of 73,000 samples."
He said this is another area where the New Orleans criminal justice system is falling behind.
"We're not even keeping pace," Gallagher explained. "What we're doing is triage on an emergency basis and the samples that are being sent are on violent crimes, and not even all violent crimes."
Professor Gallagher called on the New Orleans City Council to prioritize funding to hire more forensic investigators to work in the crime lab.
