Forensic laboratory: 'Deterioration cannot happen in this area'

EVERYONE knows about the importance of police forensics, thanks largely to television dramas such as CSI: Miami and Waking the Dead.

And of course it is not just fictional detectives who rely on their laboratory staff for the big breaks that crack their cases.

It was police scientists at Howdenhall who solved the 17-year-old riddle of Vicky Hamilton's disappearance by linking her to killer Peter Tobin through sedatives found in her blood.

Their laboratory now faces the threat of being downgraded and much of its work being transferred to other Scottish centres.

The high-profile successes at Howdenhall are many and varied, but it is also the routine work which makes a difference to so many people in the Lothians, tracing housebreakers and other offenders on a daily basis.

The Scottish Police Services Authority is facing the same pressures as every other public agency to find savings, perhaps even more so following its investment in a new 23 million laboratory in Dundee and a huge crime campus at Gartcosh.

These state-of-the-art facilities may be trumpeted as a reason not to fear, or even to welcome, any transfer of work from Howdenhall.

But that does little to overcome concerns about potential delays to investigations as cases wait in a queue alongside those from other constabularies.

This is one area where no deterioration in the service provided to Lothian and Borders Police can be tolerated.

Surnames on Leith

THE campaign to name new streets after real local people seems eminently sensible.

Many place names in the Capital were inspired by historic figures and it would be good to see this practice extended in Leith.

There is no shortage of material either, even discounting the inevitably clamour for a Proclaimer Place. How about a Paolozzi Plaza? Or a Clarice Crescent, named after Clarice Shaw, who went from Leith Town Hall to Westminster in 1945?

If those still alive are to be included - and why not? - how about the area's most famous philanthropist and businessman Sir Tom, marked by a Farmer Field?

Leith could even embrace its cultural underbelly with a Welsh Way - or a Trainspotting Terrace.