The government is examining the acquisition of state-of-the-art equipment for the Guyana Forensic Science Laboratory (GFSL) to address the current challenges facing the police in having to manually match recovered firearms and ammunition to crime scenes.
“I can tell you that there is a large number of weapons… [and] ammunition that they [the police] have to look at and to manually sit down and look at two cartridges and then map it to a crime…is going to take a lot of time,” GFSL Director Delon France said before emphasising that one has to manually look at each. “One or two persons can’t look at 1,500 shells and then say these five match the scene. It takes time,” he told the media last Wednesday shortly after the commissioning of two key pieces of equipment for the laboratory.
France explained that the lab has been working in close collaboration with the Guyana Police Force regarding firearm and ammunition matching and ranks as well as laboratory staff have benefitted from training. He noted that officers are currently looking at weapons which were recovered and are trying to see if they were indeed part of crimes.
