Assemblyman Jim Cooper was on hand at yesterday's press conference that announced that a suspect in the notorious East Area Rapist / Original Night Stalker / Golden State Killer case had been arrested. Cooper, a former Captain in the Elk Grove Sheriff's Department, spoke about the importance of DNA collection in the solution of cold case crimes and noted that an unforeseen outcome of Proposition 47, which reclassified a number of crimes from felonies to misdemeanors, was a significant drop in DNA the state collects from suspects. John Howard and Tim Foster stopped by his office today to talk about the role DNA played in the arrest of Joseph DeAngelo and about what one victim's family member described as a "buzzsaw" of opposition to increasing DNA collection for the state's crime database.
