10 Mar 2006

American Samoa seeks US funding for police laboratory

6:03 am on 10 March 2006

The Department of Public Safety in American Samoa will be seeking funding through the federal Capital Improvement Project money to finance the building of a police laboratory in Pago Pago.

The department is mainly dependent on off-island police laboratories to process all of its physical evidence and this procedure is time consuming and costly.

In a report to the Legislature, the department says it needs to establish its own laboratory that will allow police to process more physical evidence and resolve more crimes.

It says all evidence will be processed locally and will also result in the reduction in cost for having it shipped off-island.

The department will be responsible for training police officers that will man the proposed lab, the report says.

Meanwhile, the report says Public Safety needs to establish a well-determined training staff" but since local funding level is limited, it needs to explore other avenues such as federal grant and in-service training.