Police Forensics

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Managing Evidence and Evidence Locations The Forensics Module provides two major extensions to LabWare LIMS, the Evidence Location Manager and the Evidence Manager. The Evidence Location Manager extends the concept of location tracking when recording chain of custody. Evidence Locations are controlled by templates, allowing the definition of different types of location with different attributes. Evidence Locations can be related to each other as they optionally may have parent locations. Thus a location may be a rack in a refrigerator which is in a laboratory section in a particular building. The Evidence Manager is used to associate evidence with an Evidence Location and control the movement of the evidence between people and locations. The Evidence Manager also integrates with the Investigation Manager through which various pieces of evidence may be collected for investigation. Evidence types are also template driven. When there is a movement of evidence from person to person, identification and authentification of each party is required (using passwords, biometrics, tokens, etc.). When the movement is to or from a location and a person the transaction requires identification and authentification of that person and of a witness to the transaction. The Evidence Manager is also used to link evidence to other evidence and these links can build into a complex chain which LIMS represents in a tree structure. The structure also includes any Investigations where Evidence may be included and any samples that support the investigation. In the next picture you can see the Evidence Manager where it has been used to view all the evidence in an Investigation. It is interesting to note that the absence of a link can be as important as the presence of a link, for example where spent cartridges were not fired from a particular firearm. Weak links can be used to indicate that, although a link exists, the link is not valuable to the case e.g. the murder suspect was guilty of drug possession seventeen years ago.