ARVADA — A steady increase in demand for DNA analysis of crime-scene evidence is driving the Colorado Bureau of Investigation to move its flagship forensic lab from Lakewood to a bigger facility in Arvada.
The new lab, to be created inside a retrofitted 24,000-square-foot industrial building in southeast Arvada, will be three times the size of the existing Kipling Street lab and should be up and running by May.
CBI has operated out of the Lakewood lab for more than 20 years.
“Forensic analysis is under constant scrutiny by the defense community and the criminal justice community,” said Jan Girten, CBI’s deputy director of forensic services. “To have a lab that is state of the art with up-to-date equipment allows us to do the highest quality analysis.”
The Arvada facility, which will cost nearly $8 million to make operational, also will run tests and analysis on latent fingerprints, gunshot residue, toolmark evidence, drug chemistry and trace evidence.
“It’s going to accommodate the existing disciplines and the expanded DNA operations,” CBI spokeswoman Susan Medina said.
CBI has seen its DNA caseload rise as the technology has advanced and genetic evidence has become ever more critical in criminal cases. A 2013 state law tightening requirements for testing evidence from sex assaults is also putting a heavier burden on CBI.
The agency received 2,174 DNA cases in 2012; 2,306 last year; and already 2,485 through last month.
Girten said the volume of rape-kit testing alone will probably quadruple annually statewide — from 800 cases to 3,200 — as a result of the 2013 passage of House Bill 1020, which requires local law enforcement to submit evidence in sex assault cases to an accredited laboratory in the state within 30 days.
The metro area’s lab did the lion’s share of the DNA analysis statewide — 4,574 cases out of the nearly 7,000 cases received in the past 2½ years — with the agency’s two other labs, in Pueblo and Grand Junction, handling the remainder.
“Having that lab in Arvada will help improve our turnaround time,” Girten said.
Fifty-two members of the forensic services staff will work at the new facility, up from the 38 employees in Lakewood. Most of the new personnel will work in the DNA section, Girten said.
The building in Arvada was chosen primarily because it already had operated as a scientific lab and could be more easily renovated.
Mayor Marc Williams said he’s proud that Arvada can play host to the state’s pre-eminent forensics lab. And it wasn’t lost on him that CBI director Ron Sloan was once Arvada’s police chief.
“We’re always looking to have state or world headquarters here,” Williams said. “You can’t get much better than having CBI.”
The Arvada lab will open about a month after CBI moves into a new 17,000-square-foot forensics facility in Pueblo West, which will replace the one that has been housed in a Pueblo strip mall since the 1970s.
