ABSTRACT
To judge the health trends of the forensic documents (FD) market we can look at the evolution of forensic activity in the publicly funded laboratories in the United States over the years 2002, 2005, and 2009 [Peterson and Hickman 2005, Durose 2008, 2012]. The figures for FD (bold line) are compared to the total figures for forensics (fine line) in terms of budget, laboratories performing FD expertise, employees carrying out forensic services, requests for services, and median requests per FD examiner (FDE). Depicted in the graph are the trends for 2002-2005 (first segment of the trend line) and for 2005-2009 (second segment). Some figures were adjusted to the total number of laboratories. We observe that while overall the indicators for forensics are positive, FD is on a markedly declining slope.
