The Los Angeles Police Department has been denied nearly $500,000 in federal funds it would have received to help clear its backlog of unexamined DNA samples from crime scenes because of a bureaucratic mistake that LAPD brass blamed on a low-level administrator.
When informed about the funding cut by The Times, the president of the department's civilian oversight commission and an outspoken City Council member reacted with frustration.
"There must have been an absence of checks and balances for this to occur," said Anthony Pacheco, the commission president.
"Mistakes can happen," he said, "but there should be systems in place so they don't have such a dramatic effect on the department's efforts to take on such critical issues."
Faced with a backlog of about 7,000 DNA samples that have been collected as evidence at scenes of rape and other violent crimes, the LAPD has relied heavily on yearly funding allotments from a U.S. Department of Justice grant program.
This year, based on estimates of how much the department's crime lab could spend and its anticipated need, LAPD officials had expected a grant of well more than $900,000.
Inaccurate paperwork compiled for the grant application by an "overzealous" administrator, however, painted a skewed portrait of a police department slow to spend funds it had already received, said Sharon Papa, an LAPD assistant chief.
The employee refused to close the department accounting books that detailed its 2005 grant money because she could not immediately account for a few thousand dollars awarded that year.
That led Justice Department officials to think that the LAPD was far off pace on its spending and to award the department $435,860 this year, or $498,570 less than expected, according to a Justice Department spokeswoman.
"Obviously, we're not happy about it," Papa said. "The employee did not understand the ramifications of what she was doing, and truthfully neither did anyone else. That's the reality of a bureaucracy; one clerk can cause something like this to happen."
The staffer was reassigned and the department has tightened its oversight of its grant applications, Papa said. The employee, whom Papa did not identify, could not be reached for comment.
Papa said that enough grant money from previous years remains in LAPD accounts to allow criminalists to continue their work without interruption until more funds are allocated in 2009. The LAPD expects to be eligible for around $900,000, Papa said.
