From the Contra Costa Times:
A regional team of law enforcement specialists that helped crack high-profile Bay Area crimes by digging into cell phones and computer hard drives shut its doors last week, another victim of severe budget cuts that threaten similar teams across the state.
The Northern California Computer Crimes Task Force, which included agencies from Contra Costa, Solano and 11 other counties north to the Oregon border, was among five teams statewide that lost more than 40 percent of their funding in a freeze on public safety grants that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger ordered this month. No new funding was projected for next fiscal year.
The Sacramento-area task force helped in the Laci Peterson probe, said Marin District Attorney Ed Berberian, who oversaw the task force that closed Friday.
The high-tech task forces are scrambling for new funding to save the $12 million-a-year program. Deputy Attorney General Robert Morgester, who helped found the Sacramento-area task force in 1995, said the state does not have its own computer forensics laboratory for cases ranging from identity theft to gang killings to child exploitation.
"If you don't have an officer that understands how to investigate it or recover information off a suspect's computer," he said, "you don't have a case."
Click here to read the full Times story.
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