Councilmember McCarran.

Here.

Councilmember King, we have a quorum.

Let's go ahead and uh start with the approval of the minutes from the January 22nd budget committee meeting.

Councilmember King moves.

Council McKaren seconds.

All in favor?

Three A's.

The minutes are approved.

SAO Jerusalem, we're gonna take uh Dr.

Kelly out of order because she has another uh event to attend.

So Dr.

Kelly, if you want to come on up and we can talk about item number seven, Ashley, if you could read item number seven, that would be great.

Sure.

Item number seven encompasses a bunch of civil service pay plan and rule amendments that have been approved by the Civil Service Commission.

I believe Dr.

Kelly is here to talk specifically about the civil service motions that affect the police, the NLPD Crime Lab, and that's motion 7E, G, H, J, and possibly K.

Thank you.

If you all would introduce yourselves, Dr.

Kelly and uh Commander Gernon.

Hi everyone, I'm Dr.

Shamika Kelly.

I'm the director of the NOPD Crime Lab, and with me is Deputy Chief Nicholas Vernon.

Sorry, I called you Commander.

That's okay.

Um Dr.

Kelly, I I called you here because I want to talk about our DNA lab and specifically the positions that have been pending on the civil service side for approval to get the DNA lab up and running.

Can you talk about the history of what we've done in the past to outsource our sexual assault kits and then go from there and talk about why you need these positions and how they could potentially make money for the city?

Okay, yeah.

So historically, we have outsourced approximately 400 or so cases annually.

So what happens now because we don't have a functioning DNA lab, the laboratory will uh send any or the NOPD will send any cases that need DNA testing to Louisiana State Police Crime Lab, who then will outsource those to a private contracting laboratory.

And so what we've done in-house is try to build uh a DNA lab in-house so that we can remove that dependency.

Um and in doing so, what we're looking at is matching or decreasing the amount of money that it would take to do that.

So one of the things that was asked of me was to kind of compare the cost.

So looking at how much outsourcing costs versus how much it would cost to build your own program.

And what I've calculated based on estimations that I've received from the Louisiana State Police Crime Lab in the past is that approximately 400 cases will cost about 1.5 million dollars.

That is for again 400 or so cases.

The cost per case depends on what crime type it is, but if it's a property crime, it's 1,150 dollars.

If it's sexual assault, it'll be 3,000 and then 4,000 for a homicide.

I'm sorry I had that flipped.

It's 4,000 for the sexual assault and 3,000 for the homicide cases.

In-house, um, I'm sorry, that would total 1.5 million, but on top of that, what you would also have to consider is paying for adjudication.

So each case that goes to trial costs approximately 10 to 15,000 additional dollars to have someone flown in to testify.

And so considering that you're looking at about three million per year for outsourcing costs totally.

Now, comparing that to in-house cases, calculating all of the wages, benefits, overhead, maintenance, equipment, reagents included in per case, comparing apples to apples, it's about $2,400 to process a case in-house here in New Orleans whenever we build our DNA lab.

Now that equates to, if we're looking at 400 cases in totality, that equates to less than a million annually for you to process the same amount of cases.

Now, what we've been able to do in-house is build a very high throughput system internally, and so we will have the capacity to test more than 400 cases.

So that leaves room for potentially testing more case types in-house because keep in mind not everything goes to LSP, the Louisiana State Police Crime Lab.

Because of that, we can test more in-house, or we have the option to um take cases from different jurisdictions.

So if we were to do something like that, um I've calculated that the total revenue could generate approximately 360 to about 483 dollars.

It just depends on the model that we build internally as well as some other other contingencies that we would have to have before we even start talking about revenue generating.

And just as a reminder uh to the public and to my fellow council members, we allocated three million dollars to clear the sexual assault kit backlog, paying the state um through private laboratories to clear that backlog.

And then there was an additional 1.3 million dollars that Mandy Landry, Representative Landry, and uh now Mayor Moreno also advocated for at the state level.

So we have spent about 4.3 million dollars in order to clear the backlog that was sitting at the state lab.

Do we know if there's a current backlog or if that backlog is building back up?

So I inquired this morning of our special uh victims division, and to their knowledge, there is not a backlog that's building up yet.

However, supervisors from the special victims division are actually in Baton Rouge right now, meeting with the state police at the Louisiana Governor's Sexual Assault Um Committee to understand what the future year looked like, what 2026 is going to look like and what our uh caseloads might look like going forward.

So I mean, in reality, I could have probably had a better answer for you tomorrow because they're there today getting the information.

If you can get that information and email it to each of the council members, that would be helpful.

Yes, ma'am.