Bend Police Officer Crea Lancaster recalls scanning a crime scene around five years ago, where someone stole a $30,000 power cable that connected to an industrial rock crusher. Police grabbed all the evidence they could from the crime scene, even taking plaster casts of tire marks and boot prints left at the scene.

“It was a really large crime scene,” Lancaster said. “It involved a ton of different evidence from a lot of places.”

But in the end, it wasn’t the boot prints, tire marks or fingerprints that led to arresting the suspect, but a small piece of DNA-laden evidence left at the crime scene.

“It felt awesome,” Lancaster said. “We’re all in this business to catch the bad guy, so when we get a lead off of something small like that, it’s a great feeling.”

In early June, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld a Maryland statute allowing authorities to collect DNA samples from arrested suspects for major crimes, whether the arrestee has been found guilty or not. On the local level, Bend Police only take DNA swabs from convicted felons; nonetheless, the Supreme Court decision has validated local police to use DNA testing, Bend Police Lt. Chris Carney said.

“It helps our information-led policing, which makes the process less intensive as far as personnel hours involved in cases,” Carney said. “If nothing else, it’s huge savings on the tax side of things.”

Bend Police believe an increase in DNA swabbing is a boost to other forms of information gathering, such as fingerprinting and mug shots.

“They’re all unique,” Lancaster said, adding that there are more fingerprints on record than DNA swabs.

“It’s not an advantage per se, but it’s definitely an additional tool for us to find out who’s responsible.”

With Lancaster’s rock crusher case, a prior crime by the perpetrator led to his DNA being entered into the local, state and federal DNA databases. After pulling the DNA from the evidence found at the scene and entering it into the databases, he said he was able to open an investigation with probable cause.

“It turned out that he had no business being around the construction site,” Lancaster said. “It gave us a reason to go back and talk to the person to find out why they were there, which led to his arrest.”

Bend Police Chief Jeff Sale is excited about the future of DNA testing in Bend. Rapid DNA, a private company attempting to create a DNA analysis machine for on-site use, could offer law enforcement the option of analyzing DNA in as little as 90 minutes. Although still working through legal hurdles associated with privacy issues, Sale believes Rapid DNA could strongly impact the law enforcement field.

“It would be an absolute game-changer,” Sale said.

Sale said Bend police are collaborating with Oregon State Police in a pilot program called “High Throughput Property DNA Testing,” which will process DNA obtained at property crime scenes in 30 days. The typical DNA sample, Sale said, takes several months to a year depending on a lab’s workload.

“It streamlines the process of getting DNA samples from property cases to the Portland lab,” he said.

Oregon State Police forensics division supervisor Brian Ostrom said Bend Police are one of the three agencies to pilot the system, along with Salem Police and the Washington County Sheriff’s Office. Bend was picked after recommendations by the Oregon District Attorneys Association and Oregon Chief of Police Association.

“It’s going to be exciting to see the impact that this program has on property crime in Bend,” Ostrom said. He added that the program typically gets a “hit” 50 percent of the time, connecting the DNA to either an unsolved case or an offender.

The process is sped up, he said, because the state police forensics department is training police officers in the field to streamline the process. Ostrom said officers will be trained to swab evidence for DNA, a task traditionally performed by the forensics team. Also, the samples will be pre- organized into standardized collection kits and will be analyzed by robots, running 80 swabs at a time.

The program is still in the beta-testing phase, Ostrom said. State Police have worked on it for the past year and expect to continue working on it for the next six months to a year before it goes statewide.

“DNA, especially Rapid DNA once it evolves to where it needs to be, is going to be very important to law enforcement and crime solving,” Sale said. “Once it fully develops, it’s going to be as monumental as when we started using fingerprints.”