news-record.com

GREENSBORO — North Carolina will open a long-discussed crime lab in Greensboro, most likely by next summer, Attorney General Roy Cooper said Friday.

The Council of State, made up of North Carolina's top elected officials, is scheduled to approve a 10-year lease for a 10,000-square-foot lab near the Koury Convention Center next week.

The SBI lab will serve 12 counties in the center of the state, including Guilford.

"The people of the Triad will be safer with an SBI crime lab right in their backyard," Cooper said. He said it will speed processing of evidence and reduce travel time for technicians and police officers alike.

Cooper said 15 employees will work at the lab. Although the lease and employees are funded by the state budget, the Department of Justice is still piecing together funding to equip the lab. Cooper said it will take $1 million to buy the needed gear, with money coming from the state, federal grants, criminal forfeiture funds and local governments.

It will not have a DNA analysis component because of the cost of the equipment and regulations involved, but Cooper said one could be added in the future.

The lab will process evidence ranging from fingerprints to drug chemistry.

It will also process evidence from computers.

"We are spending most of our time with computer forensics with child predator cases," Cooper said. "But computers can be evidence in all kinds of cases," he said, including everything from tax fraud to murder.

The Triad crime lab is patterned on a similar lab in western North Carolina.

Contact Mark Binker at (919) 832-5549 or mbinker@news-record.com