Okay it’s time to watch another TV show where we all try to see what’s behind the actors the whole time. Hey, that’s my nail salon! It’s where the school used to be! Finally, a crime drama about forensic medicine. Crews from the new ABC show — starring Dana Delany as a flawed but brilliant medical examiner — could be spotted around town last year taping exterior scenes, turning Providence into Philadelphia.
In reality, the situation at our Department of Health crime lab is dire. Ace ProJo staff writer Amanda Milkovits first reported last month on the backlog of 400 cases. The situation is further explored in her in-depth cover story from yesterday’s Sunday paper elaborating the staffing problems and limited resources facing the lab.
. . . the forensics lab at the Health Department is so backlogged that it takes from six months to more than a year to analyze DNA in most violent-crime cases. Lesser crimes can take longer.
So, do them a favor and try not to get yourself murdered.
First episode of ‘Body of Proof’ — Death by Zeppole: Does This Smell Right To You? — Tuesday at 10pm.
The amazingly Hollywood part of the show is the offices that the Medical Examiner and her boss have. Wow! The director and stars of the show should visit some real medical examiner and government offices. Lots of windows in that exam room too.
I like how Dana Delaney shows up to the crime scene dressed in clothes like she was ready to go out clubbing for the night – high heals, short dress, all made up, etc.
Pretty funny. Not exactly Quincy, M.E. from years ago.
Yeah, I’m feeling a little weird about that. When I wrote that line last Monday all that had been in the news was a product recall. But as of this (Friday) morning, 24 people have been hospitalized and one has died. I had no idea it would become that serious. Nine people are still hospitalized and we wish them a speedy recovery.
I find the first episodes title and this:
http://www.health.ri.gov/news/foodprotection/
amusingly coincidental….
I recall the brilliant Tom Sgouros noting that in financing public functions, there are effective limits at both ends. Most pundits are only familiar (or at least claim to be) with the upper end, popularly known as ‘waste’. But there is a bottom end, too, and many people don’t appreciate that. If a public function is starved of funding, it become less efficient and effective, until it becomes all but useless.
Quantitatively, such a function nearly starved to death must represent, proportionately, much greater waste than one that is over-funded. That is, instead of, say, 10% of its funding not delivering qualitative benefits to the public, a much greater proportion of its funding fails to deliver such benefits. In theory, it could be possible to reach 100% waste in this way.
It may be very hard — perhaps even impossible — for most of us to estimate how much any particular function should be funded in order to approach optimal efficiency. But it’s asinine to assume that a public office can be ‘made’ to be more efficient simply by cutting their funding by some arbitrary amount. At some point, they can’t do their job anymore.
I’m guessing that if we were to go and look, we’d find that Carcieri’s ‘tough love’ campaign of slashing funding and staffing across the board (except his own office) cut enough out of this office to make it all but impossible for them to do the job they’ve been charged with.