On October 23, 2006, the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office unveiled its new state of the art 2.5 million dollar Crime Scene Unit facility. The facility consists of a 15,000 square foot building designed to enhance the collection, processing, and packaging of forensic evidence in Essex County. The facility includes a vehicle processing room equipped with a hydraulic lift which allows the Crime Scene Detectives to examine vehicles from all angles; a forensic processing room designed to better enable a Detective to locate and identify fingerprints on various types of evidence; a drying chamber room designed for the processing and packaging of blood-soaked clothing; a digital photography room, as well as a new large evidence storage room capable of handling more than 50 times the amount of evidence which could be stored at the previous facility.

The Crime Scene Unit now enables the Detective staff to access the Internet via a high-speed computer system thus allowing for instant communications with all law enforcement agencies. The computer system also features a 3-D animated Crime Scene Sketch and Reconstruction software to which allows the Detectives the ability to visually reconstruct a crime scene. Also, the Unit utilizes three fully stocked field vehicles for processing evidence at any crime scene. These vehicles are equipped with portable lighting systems and alternate light sources which enable the Detectives to view bodily fluids, hairs, fibers, and latent fingerprints invisible to the human eye under natural light.