Forensic Science Division
Responsibilities
The Forensic Science Division provides a comprehensive forensic scientific service to the Criminal Justice System in Hong Kong. In meeting that commitment the service seeks to be impartial, accurate and efficient, complementing a wide range of specialist analytical tasks with informed scientific opinion on the significance of the results obtained.
It is the primary obligation of the Division to provide services to Government Departments concerned with law and order without fiscal restraint at individual case level but subvented organisations, such as the Hospital Authority, provide an overall annual payment which accrues to General Treasury revenue, to cover use of the Division's analytical services.
Besides performing laboratory analyses on articles submitted for examination by these departments, the Division also provides a round-the-clock crime scene examination service, which aims to lend expert assistance to the identification and retrieval of relevant scientific evidence materials for examination. The myriad of scenes requiring attendance ranges from the relatively simple burglaries, to serious ones in homicides, rapes, etc. There are also officers specially trained for more specialised investigations, such as the causes of fires, re-constructing traffic accidents, interpreting bloodstain patterns where blood is shed and investigating suspected illicit drug manufacturing/cultivation activities.
Organisation
The Division comprises two Groups of sections viz. the Criminalistics and Quality Management Group (six sections) and the Drugs, Toxicology and Documents Group (five sections).
Quality Assurance
From 1996-2011, the Forensic Science Division was accredited by American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors / Laboratory Accreditation Board (ASCLD/LAB) under the Legacy Programme; since 2011, it has been accredited by Hong Kong Accreditation Service (HKAS) under ISO/IEC 17025. The transition to the ISO/IEC 17025 standard extended the accreditation scope for the Division to include non-crime testing areas such as hair drug testing in screening and monitoring the rehabilitation of drug-abusers.