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D.C.’s Department of Forensic Science, which has been without accreditation since 2021, may finally regain it as early as January 2024, according to Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau.
After a site visit on Thursday, Nadeau announced that the agency had filed for reaccreditation in September and requested a fast-track review. Three days of on-site visits will need to take place in December by the accrediting body, ANSI National Accreditation Board. It could then take two to six weeks for the accreditation to come through, should the inspection not turn up any errors. The inspection may, depending on what ANSI concludes, require additional follow-ups or adjustments, according to a spokesperson for Nadeau, but based on the current timeline, DFS could regain accreditation as early as January. (A DFS spokesperson did not immediately return DCist/WAMU’s request for comment.)
It’s a huge development for D.C.’s embattled crime lab — which handles the preservation and analysis of forensic evidence — and for public safety in the city more broadly.
DFS lost its accreditation in April 2021 over accuracy concerns (including errors in DNA analyses), compromised prosecutions, and a lack of transparency. The city first opened the lab in 2012 as a means to divorce scientific evidence gathering and processing from police work, theoretically avoiding bias and wrongful convictions; but in the decade following its creation, the lab was often beset by errors. Without...
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