Tempe taxpayers will pay another city hundreds of thousands of dollars to perform forensics work, including processing major crime scenes and training Tempe’s crime scene members, after concerns over what is happening inside the forensics unit.
The ABC15 Investigators first reported that there are areas of concern within Tempe's Forensic Services Unit (FSU) in October.
Tempe’s FSU is made up of crime scene technicians who process crime scenes from homicides and sexual assaults to officer-involved shootings.
The ABC15 Investigators obtained a memo from Tempe’s assistant police chief to the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office dated Sept. 27, 2023, which said: “A recent assessment of staff capabilities revealed a lack of consistency in operations, and a separate evaluation of our latent print analysis capability identified significant shortcomings,” wrote Interim Assistant Police Chief James Sweig.
“Given the critical nature of these analyses, a zero-defect performance standard is imperative,” the letter said.
RELATED: 'Areas of Concern' around Tempe Police Department’s forensic unit, memo reveals
The City of Tempe is doing an audit of cases dating back three years to look for potential issues or errors around a certain type of fingerprinting.
On Monday, Mesa’s city council approved an intergovernmental agreement with the City of Tempe to process all major crime scenes, provide latent and inked print analysis, and train five members from Tempe’s Forensic Services Unit.
According to the agreement between the two agencies, Tempe will pay Mesa $859,000 for fiscal year 2023-2024. The scope of work shows that Mesa is estimated to respond to approximately 20 major scenes while Tempe’s crime scene members go through a 16-week training.
Kimberly Meza, Mesa’s Deputy Director of the crime lab, tells the ABC15 Investigators that they process around 600 crime scenes, so “20 scenes for an entire year is actually a very small quantity for us,” she said. “We will be handling those scenes with overtime and also we are designing it that our crime scene supervisors will mostly be responding to Tempe, leaving our crime scene specialist here in the city.”
Meza said that the money they will be receiving includes additional costs since they already had a contract in place.
“This was already the contract we had, and we added these additional services so it’s just encompassing everything,” she added.
The City of Tempe has not responded to ABC15's questions regarding the concerns with the crime scene unit.
A spokesperson for the City of Tempe said in an email, “Once again, our ongoing internal review of three years of work by the unit shows that no cases have been compromised. The new supervisor, new policies and procedures, and the additional training our technicians are receiving will only make this unit even better.”
That email went on to state, “Any suggestion that our team receiving additional training will somehow compromise casework is simply wrong.”
RELATED: Tempe officials waited months to disclose concerns around their crime scene technicians
Have a tip? Email Investigator Nicole Grigg nicole.grigg@abc15.com.
