All of The Department’s Detectives Are Working on Eight Slaying Cases
By Andrew Marra, Palm Beach Post (Florida)
The eight unsolved murders that nailed West Palm Beach last month have tied up so many police resources that investigations of routine crimes are being delayed across the city, officials say.
Consumed by the days of analysis and paperwork that follow each murder, crime scene investigators have had to stop assisting patrol officers with small-time burglaries and car break-ins.
The detective squad, meanwhile, has been spread so thin that investigators who normally specialize in car thefts, property crimes or crimes against children have all been assigned major roles in investigating the recent murders.
At the same time, requests for processing fingerprints and other evidence from the scenes of run-of-the-mill crimes have taken a back seat as officials pore over material connected to the latest killings.
“We’ve run into a big bottleneck,” said King Brown, the West Palm Beach Police Department’s crime scene supervisor. “Unfortunately that’s just the nature of the beast.”
As detectives put in overtime hours and additional officers are pulled in to beef up patrols in troubled neighborhoods, officials acknowledge they can do only so much with their limited resources.
“Obviously, the more violent crimes are going to take precedence,” said Dena Kimberlin, a police department spokeswoman. “But all the cases will be worked through.”
Kimberlin said it is rare for a large number of specialized detectives to be pulled off their regular cases to assist in homicide investigations. But all of the department’s 22 detectives have been trained to investigate murders, she said.
The department’s nine crime scene investigators are still analyzing scenes of reported rapes, robberies, aggravated batteries and major burglaries, Brown said.
But the amount of effort involved in analyzing a murder scene — including fingerprints, photography, blood work, gun ballistics and extensive paperwork — is such that each new killing is creating devastating backlogs, he said.
“Everything gets dropped when that happens,” Brown said. “With the manpower, you can only do so much.”