Basseterre, St. Kitts, March 03, 2022 (SKNIS): The Royal St. Christopher and Nevis Police Force, and in particular the Forensic Department, has had major successes in solving crimes. This is according to the Director of the Forensic Department, Latoya Lake-Marshall during her appearance on the virtual forum series, Leadership Matters, on March 01.
In response to a question posed on the recent successes of the department, Mrs. Lake-Marshall said, “Based on the statistics, we have solved quite a bit of murders from 2018 to present via ballistics links from our lab [with our] comparison microscope led by our ballistics examiner.”
“When I came to the Federation, I hit the ground running and we have linked quite a bit of sexual offence cases to the perpetrators as I have mentioned. There was one perpetrator that was linked to actually six scenes and that included rape [and] robbery from the person,” said the forensic director.
She added that the department has also had “hits via technology which is our AFIS system (Automated Fingerprint Identification System) as our lab is fully equipped where we extract prints from scenes.”
She went on to explain the process saying, “Our technicians will go out and they are very effective at lifting prints from the scene. Once we get that, we go back to the lab and we deal with processing. We have been very effective with our collections, we have had major successes in various offenses, we have linked more than one case and when you’re a specialist and you can link matters together, that means you are doing something well.”
Mrs. Lake-Marshall said the Forensic Department operates under the motto: Detection with a Passion.