The beaver county district attorney proposes to implement the ten-county SW-PA rapid DNA law enforcement initiative

The Beaver County District Attorney's Office received a $577,000 Project Grant award from the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Assistance to implement the Ten-County SW-PA Rapid DNA Law Enforcement Initiative. The project will establish a regional Rapid DNA profile database to enable law enforcement agencies across 10 counties in southwest Pennsylvania to generate investigative leads, identify suspects, and exonerate the innocent. The funding will be used to purchase and maintain a Rapid DNA instrument that will be made available to law enforcement throughout the region, and to submit Rapid DNA profiles to the shared database. By combining these profiles with an existing Rapid DNA database in eastern Pennsylvania, the project aims to increase the solve rate for violent crimes, property crimes, and sex crimes across the state. The Project Grant is awarded under the Congressionally Recommended Awards program (CFDA 16.753), which supports improvements to the criminal justice system.

The mission is to create a SW-PA rapid DNA profile database enabling law enforcement to generate leads, identify suspects, and at the same time exonerating the innocent. The project will have two components: (1) the purchase and maintenance of a rapid DNA instrument to be made available to law enforcement throughout the ten-county region; and (2) submission of rapid DNA profiles to a shared rapid DNA profile database. The rapid DNA profiles generated by the ten-county SW PA regional initiative will be combined with an existing rapid DNA database comprised of multiple counties and law enforcement agencies in the delaware valley of eastern PA. Sharing DNA data and cross-checking profiles across multiple counties across the state (SW-PA and the delaware valley in eastern PA) will increase the solve rate for violent crimes, property crimes and SEX crimes. Expected beneficiaries include the municipal law enforcement agencies and the citizens they serve throughout SW-PA.