Daily News | Philly’s medical examiner’s office is understaffed and struggling to investigate deaths. Fixing it might take years.
Philadelphia is struggling to properly investigate all of its sudden and unexplained deaths, a new report has found, citing the city’s opioid crisis, COVID-19, and a record-high homicide rate for exacerbating problems in an understaffed Medical Examiner’s Office.
“It’s a common problem across the nation that medical examiners and coroners offices are underfunded and understaffed,” said Fudenberg. “The crux of that problem is the counties don’t fund the offices.”One of the office’s primary goals is to ensure investigators are present when a police officer shoots someone or a person dies in government custody, like in a jail or prison, Bettigole said.
The report noted an independent review is particularly important in those cases to boost public trust. ”These deaths have the potential to be highly politicized, drawing heavy media interest and scrutiny,” the report stated.Instead, staffers are swamped by a tide of death investigations that have only become worse during the pandemic. In 2021, the office performed 1,721 autopsies. That’s more than 240 autopsies per pathologist, the report stated.
Medical examiners aren’t regulated by the federal government, and there are no national standards for the profession. About 4% of the nation’s 2,500 offices were accredited as of 2016, according to the report, although it is more common in big cities.to defense attorneys, who could home in on the medical examiner’s lack of professional certification, Fudenberg said.
The city has not had contact with the families of the bombing’s victims since the report was released
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