At the start of the summer, Professor Angela Gallop wrote to the policing minister Sarah Jones MP, warning of ‘a major misstep’ in its plans to place forensic science even further under police control. The country’s leading forensic scientist was clearly frustrated at the seeming political indifference to two separate parliamentary investigations published in the last 12 months. Both highlighted what they perceived to be an existential threat to the future viability of the sector and, furthermore, the danger of the police taking forensics ‘in-house’.
The graveyard spiral
Professor Gallop co-chaired a two-and-a-half-year investigation by the Westminster Commission on Forensic Science commissioned by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Miscarriages of Justice. The plain-speaking title of the report published in June last year was ‘Forensic science in England and Wales: pulling out of the graveyard spiral’, invoking a plane plummeting earthwards where every panicked ‘correction’ by the pilot only serves to hasten the catastrophic impact.
At its launch, Baroness Sue Black,
