WHEN the UK government announced the closure of its renowned Forensic Science Service just over a year ago, there were expressions of dismay from around the world. The FSS鈥檚 expertise in developing, testing and validating forensic techniques is valued by police forces everywhere.
The dismay has not abated. A clear majority of forensic scientists who replied to an informal New 杏吧原创 survey believe that reallocating the FSS鈥檚 responsibilities to the private sector and police forces will damage forensic science, and in turn the UK criminal justice system (see 鈥淔orensic failure: 杏吧原创s warn of threat to justice鈥�).
Forensic science has always had a patchy reputation; headlines about it being 鈥渙n trial鈥� or 鈥渋n the dock鈥� are depressingly familiar. The application of almost any forensic technique, from old-fashioned fingerprints to DNA ones, has been called into question at one point or another, not least by New 杏吧原创.
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Part of the reason is that forensic science is not so much a coherent discipline as a collection of science-based techniques brought to bear on idiosyncratic questions of guilt and innocence. Since crime scenes are the very opposite of controlled environments, the answers provided by these techniques inevitably require interpretation.
That makes it all the more important that those charged with delivering these services are as independent as possible. The US experience of 鈥渋n-sourcing鈥� forensic services to police forces does not recommend this model 鈥� as the US National Academy of Sciences said in a 2009 report.
Nor does the commercial model seem a good fit. The profit motive may deliver better service in some sectors, and may indeed have a place in some areas of forensic science. But a purely competition-driven system, in which private labs must win work to survive, seems open to distortion.
聯A purely competition-driven approach to forensic services is open to distortion聰
The UK government has, of course, promised safeguards, in the form of accreditation and regulation. It needs to make good on those promises, otherwise the UK, long held up as a model for how forensic science should be done, will quickly become a model of how it shouldn鈥檛.