Biben: Crime lab rife with bureaucracy

Beyond analyzing years of failures by Nassau's crime lab, state investigators last week cast a rare public light on bureaucratic banalities in the county police department as it ran the facility.

Union friction is one of many small subplots in state Inspector General Ellen Biben's 184-page report. When former County Executive Thomas Suozzi was interviewed about the lack of contiguous space for the lab, for example, he noted that the union opposed a plan to move it to a newly converted warehouse in Westbury, the IG says.

Of bigger consequence, the report suggested, was that union rules barred police assigned to the lab from getting performance evaluations -- a restriction that former police commissioners found detrimental, the IG said.

Contacted Friday, both Nassau PBA President James Carver and Detectives' Association President Glenn Ciccone noted that such evaluations would be a collective bargaining issue -- one the county hasn't raised in years. As for the lab's planned move from Mineola, Carver acknowledged the PBA had opposed it, based on such considerations as a reduction of space.

More importantly, internal strife and communication failures up and down the department's ranks are documented in the report. Police brass, faulted on numerous counts for how they ran the lab, saw their warning memos watered down by higher-ups. Some police officers in the lab saw civilian colleagues as rivals usurping their overtime pay.

The IG also found a "seeming disinclination" at one point by former Commissioner Lawrence Mulvey "to engage in a productive transition with outgoing former Commissioner James Lawrence." And word of the lab's long-running issues apparently never reached District Attorney Kathleen Rice until the opening weeks of her second term, the IG reported.

County Executive Edward Mangano says his office has been working "diligently" on establishing a new lab outside the police department. He added Friday through spokeswoman Katie Grilli-Robles that "adjustments in police supervision will likely occur" after a full review of Biben's report and other fact-gathering under way.

The report said lab requests for more resources were "buried deep in budget submissions and did not include more significant information about the lab's ongoing accreditation problems."

State bureaucrats dropped the ball, too. A forensic commission within the Division of Criminal Justice Services -- now under new leadership -- "failed to effectively respond to the [lab's] troubled 8-year history," the report said.