INDIAN RIVER COUNTY — Eight months have come and gone since the Indian River County Sheriff’s Office moved its forensics unit into its new, 4,500-square-foot forensic crime lab loaded with state of the art technology and equipment.
After settling in, those who work day in and day out at the Indian River Forensic Crime Lab say there are few words to describe how much of a positive impact the new facility has had on their work.
“There is not a piece of our workload that hasn’t been improved,” said Sgt. Kyle King.
King spearheaded the design efforts for the new facility. He worked with architects for a year, trading plans back and forth until he finally felt that all of the requirements and needs of law enforcement working within the confines of the facility would be met.
“I made sure everything I had ever complained about was addressed,” King said.
Thanks to King’s design and insistence that no corners be cut, forensic crews now work in conditions that allow them to be exponentially more efficient than years past.
For starters, a new staging room allows detectives to reconstruct crime scenes to the most minute detail. The staging room is intentionally designed with photography in mind, making sure that the best lighting is used for shooting photographs of the re-created scene.
But according to King, one of the best aspects of the staging room is, it can stay a staging room.
Prior to the new facility, the staging room would have to be assembled and dis-assembled every day in order to make room for other work-related tasks to be carried out in the same area.
In a similarly tight predicament, King said, “the old processing room was so small, we didn’t have room to move around the tables.”
Every day, the processing room had to be reconfigured and set-up for whatever evidence would be tested, analyzed, or observed that shift. Then, the room would be broken down or morphed into a new room to meet different forensic needs.
The work of setting up, breaking down, moving, and storing was a daily routine that ate up valuable time for everyone involved.
Sgt. Eric Flowers even remembered men having to store certain equipment in their own trucks because there was simply no room.
The same story of more space equaling more efficiency has transcended across the board at the crime lab, where there is a dedicated room for just about everything: a climate controlled garage space to process evidence in vehicles, organized evidence storage, and a room dedicated to processing electronic evidence.
“Our old evidence room looked like something on the TV show, ‘Hoarders’” King said. He also called the old garage a “sweat box.”
“Some of the guys would choose to come in in the middle of the night just to be cooler,” Sgt. Flowers said.
On one particular Monday afternoon, as about a dozen employees clipped along at their designated tasks in their new spaces, King’s sentiment that the new facility was a long-time coming was echoed by just about everyone.
King has left a few pieces of the “ancient” equipment visible in the processing room, if for no other reason than to remind everyone who comes through the doors that even if the task is difficult, it used to be a lot worse.
