CLPEX Chat Board

Is anyone aware of a study or report on the optimum number of cases per year, or any other time period for that matter, for a latent examiner to minimize mistakes and or fatigue or similar best practices/office policy type documents for latent examiner units and where I might get copies of same if they exisit?

Moved to main board.

Drecker a topic I would love to explore.

First what is a case? Define it. I know some agencies that state they clear 15 cases per month per examiner, while another state they clear 35 cases per month per examiner, while another claims they clear 80-90 cases per month per examiner.

A case can consisit of 1 latent print with one subject to compare to 150 latent prints with 30 subjects to compare.

That is why I do not believe (like is a better word) tracking a LPE productivity by cases.

Now to answer your question-----I know of no such study. It would be more use to the discipline if there was such a study than some of them that are going on right now.

Good luck in your search-----give me your definition of a case?

It strikes me that it would be like trying to determine how many diagnoses an internist could do in a month and not make any errors. (Not a real good example, unless you pretend that it's possible to make no errors in medical diagnosis.) Any number obtained will be so unreliable as to be at best useless and at worst harmful. Every "case" has different tasks. Every task is different. Every instance of the same task is different from other instances of that task. And the distribution of "cases" with different profiles of difficulty and required tasks is different every month. Further, without actually doing the "cases," you can't know enough to parcel them out to create the kind of caseload the numbers expect.

The presumed intent of such study would be to learn something about how much work you can put on an examiner before performance suffers. (It's far from being just about the worst kind of errors.) But I think any such goal is futile and inappropriate. There is indeed a desire on the part of examiners to be able to say when too much is being asked of them. But think about what you have to claim as the virtues of any numbers you propose. When you argue for some numerical limits, you can only argue the numbers relative to performance, which includes minimizing missed evidence, as well as erroneous results. And you're not likely to have that information along with your counts. You can't, for instance, test limits by increasing workloads until you begin missing evidence, because you're not going to know when you begin missing evidence. What you're seeking is simply not a notion compatible with this kind of expert analytical task. It's like telling en internist he should be able to make N diagnosis per day and claiming that if he is asked to make that many, his performance will be close to optimum. That's silly, as well as dangerous. If you fear you are risking an error on account of trying to do some required number of cases, you're doing too many and doing a poor job on at least some of them.

I do understand that there will be organizations where some number is taken to be an expected work level. That doesn't make the number valid, nor does it mean there is any valid number. I think the truth is that NO numerical standard is going to be valid and that it is simply a matter of whether or not a unit is managed as appropriate for the kind of work it's doing or not, including management's ability and feasibility of conveying the nature and needs of the unit to the parent management. If that happy situation exists (and management in such organizations tends to be the astute, aware "walking around" kind of management that knows what can be done with the resources), you get optimal performance to whatever measure you choose. If not, you pretend everything's okay if you're keeping the heat off.

Let's face it, though. For most, it's a balance between quality and backlog. And to intelligently strike a balance you can live with takes wide-awake, agile and aware management, not pretending that some numbers mean anything. In other words, professional management of professional expert work. A lot of examiners won't have that, partly because some units tend to share the commonly poor management found too often in law enforcement agencies. They won't fix it with numbers. Mostly, they won't fix it.

I remember reading an article quite some time ago that indicated an examiner should be able to handle a case a day on average. I kept track of the unit monthly totals and averaged them over a three year period and the number was slightly over this mark. The cases included a wide variety of work, from one lift containing no prints of value to cases including hundreds of latents. I don’t think establishing quotas for examiners is a good idea, but if you have an employee that is working well below a reasonable threshold I would take a closer look at their work to determine what is going on. Each department will have its own challenges, procedures and workflow so you should calculate your own average over an extended period of time. I will try to locate the article for you.

thank you.

The range of presentations that qualify as a "case" points up the difficulty of answering this kind of question. Let's say that for study purposes that's accepted as the definition of a "case," and we decide to count cases and find that there are N cases being handled. But, as you say, "cases" includes no-value cases, one or two lift cards with vague fingertip shaped smudges or, if the examiners also do latent processing, the weathered rock the patrol officer decided might have prints. So to know what the numbers mean, you have to know a lot about the distribution of task loads among the cases. There are agencies where responding officers are trained and encouraged to seek prints on scenes and what's clearly of no value and to know what's worth bringing in and what's not. In other agencies, the day's input of "cases" may be largely valueless stuff that takes a few seconds to reject. Even attitudes to different types of offenses make a big difference. Is the agency willing and able to go all out in routine burglary cases, bringing in a lot of objects to work on? Or is it just take the report forget it? And in a state lab, these differences in knowledge and attitude among the agencies they serve produce the same kind of variety. Certainly, the least able agencies will be sending their stuff to the state lab.

Your numbers suggest something more than six cases per day per examiner. But it doesn't mean much unless you know if it's five cases screened out as no value and one actual examination or two screened out and four examinations. That's why I say it's impossible to settle the issue by counting. When you can't do the cases with reasonable confidence of not missing anything important and maintain a reasonable backlog, it's too much. And I don't think there's any way to monitor that but by close attention and involvement on the part of managers who are willing to go on the record to those above when there's a risky overload. That's what actual professional organizations do, not counting and pretending. When broken, it's very difficult for line personnel to fix. Government organizations respond mainly to publicly revealed disaster, as any news day will demonstrate.

There's also a potential for an organization to feel overloaded when it really a problem of allocating work and how it flows. Management issue again.

I think it has more to do with how many court cases and how many homicides are you dealing with. One homicide may be 2 weeks or more work load, but I could write off as no value 50 cases in a day if I was that way inclined. I agree numbers of cases mean very little, maybe number of comparisons made maybe more useful. We in NZ tend to look at the number of idents made but that in itself can be a problem.

Hello Decker,

Do your examiners do latent print comparisons only? If they do lab processing of evidence and AFIS/IAFIS (and Cogent or local AFIS) entry, you're talking about alot of work for four fulltime exminers. While I am not aware of any study I would think that narrowing it down to how many exams your department does (which you have done) then looking at the types of cases, i.e. persons/property crimes, the average volume of latent prints you would probably come to the conclusion that you need more people.....which is what you're saying in the first place. I guess what I am trying to say is that if you are frustrated because of the overload, it is probably true. Unfortunately a study showing your need may not do any good to those who do not have you on their priority radar. I am not sure how you would do it, but making a positive impression in some way (getting their attention), and coming up viable written solutions (such as a putting in for a grant for overtime, or a temporary position that could be later morphed into a fulltime position), using current admin buzz words might get some action, but I wouldn't count on it.......

The other solution, probably more realistic, is do not under any circumstances go any faster that you would normally do on any exam, making sure that each case is done correctly no matter what the external pressures are and encourage all others to do the same. I am not saying slow down, just do not change proper protocols and methodology for each examination. Of course a significant backlog will occur and will have to be dealt with by administrators. Cases that are needed now (we call them "hot shots") will be done according to priority such as the case is going to court or about to past statue, and detectives will be grumbling and griping. Until the need is confronted by those who can do something about it, all one can do is come in everyday and give your best effort......

That's my 2 cents
Pete Salicco
CCSA/CLPE