The Long Arm of the Law

I know police work is difficult and dangerous, but I can't help chuckling when the police trip over their own feet. Here is a blog entry from the Freakonomics site:

For 16 years, police in Germany hunted a female serial killer whose DNA was identified at 40 crime scenes, including six murders. Exasperated, investigators dubbed her “the phantom of Heilbronn,” after the town in which she allegedly killed a policewoman. A state prosecutor on her trail said he “just couldn’t believe that the same woman could be capable” of all the crimes to which she’d been linked. Well, it turns out she wasn’t. Police officials this week revealed the source of the DNA they’ve been chasing all over Europe. It came from the cotton swabs used to collect DNA evidence at each of the phantom-killer crime scenes. The swabs had probably been contaminated by a woman who works in the factory where the swabs were produced.

My solution? Better training, higher standards, better pay, and smarter police techniques. Unfortunately, calls for this really ends up just feeding the beast with more money, bigger bureaucracy, and more incompetence. So my "solution" is a non-solution until somebody finds a way to put somebody in charge of reform who is really committed to changing an institution in desperate need of improvement and modernization.