MADISON (WKOW) -- The Wisconsin Department of Justice released its 2020 crime laboratories report which shed some light on changes made .
The 2020 document is the latest in a series of annual reports that the agency sends out annually. The Department of Justice released the latest installment Friday.
The labs have struggled to improve their turnaround times in all manner of evidence testing for years. Attorney General Josh Kaul made improving the labs' efficiency a major campaign issue in 2018.
He released a report Thursday detailing turnaround times for 2020. DNA analysis took on average three fewer days and ballistics work was on average 11 days faster.
But drug testing took on average 11 days longer, even though the labs saw 1,048 fewer submissions than in 2019. And the average turnaround time for tool mark analysis was 1,164 days, up from 235.
"In 2020, the Wisconsin State Crime Lab met the challenges of the pandemic and kept staff safe, changing workflows in lab space and building a new digital security system to allow remote work and minimize disruption," Kaul said of the report. "Amid these challenges, crime lab staff not only continued to serve the State of Wisconsin, but also added new services."
The potentially deadly opioid fentanyl made up 8 percent of all drugs identified by the state crime lab.
The state provided a bullet-pointed list of some of the findings from the report:
- DFS leadership and employees went to great lengths to keep staff safe while continuing to do critical in-person work through the COVID-19 pandemic, all while maintaining turnaround times.
- The Forensic Toxicology Unit, which identifies and quantifies drugs and alcohol in biological samples, has seen increasingly complicated compounds that require more-detailed analysis, resulting in slightly higher turnaround times and the need for the additional toxicology positions requested in the DOJ budget.
- Fentanyl accounted for 8% percent of the drugs identified by the Controlled Substances Unit, up from zero in 2015.
- The Crime Scene Response Teams responded to over 100 scenes while also providing crime scene response training to local law enforcement.
- The crime laboratories receipted almost 9,000 cases in 2020.
The entire report is available here.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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