Publicly Funded Forensic Crime Laboratories, 2020

• NCJ Number: 306473
• Author(s): Connor Brooks
• Date Published: December 2023
• Length: 33 pages
• Corporate Author: Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS)
• Publication Format: Document (Online)
• Publication Type: Publication; Statistics
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America
• Note: Part of the BJS Census of Publicly Funded Forensic Crime Laboratories publication series.

Abstract

This report provides data on the workloads, staffing, resources, policies, procedures, and budgets of the 326 standalone forensic labs and multilab systems (totaling 423 individual labs) in 2020. It also includes counts of employees and service requests in 2019.

Highlights:

• In 2020, the 326 publicly funded forensic crime laboratories and multilab systems in the United States received 3.3 million requests for service.
• Requests for controlled substances analysis accounted for a third (33%) of all requests that crime labs received in 2020.
• State-run crime labs received nearly 60% of all requests in 2020.
• At yearend 2020, crime labs had a backlog of about 710,900 requests that had not been completed within 30 days of submission.