Crime lab needs cash

By Benjamin Baxter
The Collegian

The criminology lab on campus continues to have no open student assistant positions due to a lack of funding, laboratory director Bruce Palmer said Friday.

“To be able to hire a student onto the staff, we need to run background checks,” Palmer said. “This has to be done by an outside agency.”

Getting an outside agency would cost money. “They’re already overworked. They simply don’t have enough people to get the background checks done and to get more people you need more money,” Palmer said.

“Frankly, there are things that simply must be a higher priority for us,” he said.

Such extra funds would need to be allocated to the state budget, but not as an increase in support for the CSU system; the crime lab is managed separately from campus.

It is the first California Department of Justice Crime Lab on a university campus.

In April 2002, Fresno State President John Welty said the lab would give Fresno State students an opportunity to see how sciences are applied, which might encourage students to pursue careers in the field.

Junior criminology major David Bridge said he had no personal interest in working at the lab.

“I wouldn’t want to do it. What they do is mostly forensics,” Bridge said, “but I think it would be a great opportunity for people trying to get a master’s in that field.”

The practical quality of such a program, even for only master’s students, may not have been determined yet.

Palmer estimates that the construction of the state-of-the-art laboratory was about $11 million and that there is about $3 million worth of equipment inside the lab itself.

The state-funded lab serves multiple government agencies across seven counties, including those of Tulare, Madera and Fresno, according to the California Department of Justice.

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