The Yuma County Sheriff’s Office (YCSO) is joining the Arizona Department of Public Safety’s Rapid DNA Law Enforcement Program to get quicker information to use in local investigative cases.
Rapid DNA is an expanding technology nationwide and Arizona has been on the forefront of this technology since 2014. YCSO is the first agency to go live with one of the four RapidHIT ID instruments that were purchased for Arizona through the Y22 Legislative funding to expand the Rapid DNA Law Enforcement Program. YCSO is also the first site outside of the metro Phoenix and Tucson areas.
Yuma County currently does not have a full-scale forensic DNA analysis lab requiring cases to be sent to the state crime lab. Investigators are accustomed to waiting several weeks to several months for the results. The RapidHIT ID instrument generates forensic DNA profiles in as little as 90 minutes with a simple cheek swab or evidence sample.
YCSO now has two investigators who have been trained and certified to operate the equipment with more scheduled to be trained. YCSO is looking forward to using this Rapid DNA technology that could immediately impact an investigation; such as link suspects with past crimes, collect and rapidly process crime scene samples for investigative leads, and significantly reduce the time to identify or eliminate a potential suspect.
DNA profiles generated through the program can be searched against a standalone database maintained by the Arizona Department of Public Safety for the Arizona Rapid DNA Law Enforcement Program, which contains convicted offender and arrestee samples for the state of Arizona. For more information on the Rapid DNA Law Enforcement Program, please visit: https://azdps.gov/crimelab [azdps.gov] and click on the link for Rapid DNA.
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