Can anyone tell me if the behaviour of the characters in all the CSI TV series is anything like the real thing? Do the police officers looking for forensic evidence really wander around the crime scene in their street clothes waiving their little torches?
I was struck again by this when I saw the news coverage of the police investigation of the murder of the five girls in Suffolk. Whenever we see the scene of crime team working in the UK they are covered from head to foot in disposable white boiler suits – I understand this is considered essential so as not to contaminate the evidence – would this be the same in real life in the States?
I can understand why the CSI producers would use some artistic licence - it wouldn’t be the same if all we could see of Melina Kanakaredes was her eyes
We’ve covered this before. Based on info from a friend who does this for the Minneapolis Police department, much of it is basically true (just greatly hyped up for dramatic effect).
Here are the major ‘inaccuracies’ that he mentioned.
The investigators at the scene and the technical experts in the lab are different people. They do NOT do both. You’ll never see the guy who did the test in lab out making the arrest.
On TV, the tests always show a clear guilty/not guilty response. In real life, a large number of the tests come back “inconclusive”. He estimated that more than 50% of his tests do NOT produce usable evidence.
On TV, the test results are available in minutes. In real life, many of them take hours or days before they know the results.
On TV, they have spacious labs full of the newest modern equipment, and technicians just waiting around to run their tests. In real life, police labs are crowded, often using older equipment, understaffed, and with a backlog of tests waiting to be run. Now a case like the Suffolk Strangler would jump to the front of the line (queue), but your average drug-dealer-stabbed-in-the-alley? – that’d wait it’s turn in the testing backlog.
On TV, nobody ever mentions what it costs to do these tests. In real life, many of them are quite expensive, and police budgets are limited. There are often arguments/discussions between the lab manager, the detective investigating the case, and the County Attorney prosecuting the case over whether this test is really necessary and do you have enough to convict the criminal without this test.
About the white suits at the crime scene, he’s a lab guy, so he doesn’t really know. But he says they are constantly annoyed in the lab by sample contamination (crime scenes are generally rather messy, after all) and encouraging both the first responders and the crime scene guys to be as careful as possible about this. (Didn’t Sherlock Holmes complain about this, in his first story, in 1887?)
He also mentioned that those white suits “aren’t free, you know” – they cost money, both to buy and in slowing down the investigators, so that eventually somebody has to work overtime to catch up on the other cases. So I’d think it’s quite possible that they are used on major cases like this one, but often skipped on the normal everyday case.
Another inaccuracy of the CSI series is when the forensic investigators are shown interrogating suspects. Interrogation is a completely different specialty than forensic science and there’s no reason why one person would be doing both.
Thanks for the info. Sorry if this has been answered before - as a new member I didn’t think to search :smack:
Not surprised about the answers - real life is never as neat as this sort of slick TV show! Specialists do specialist jobs, you would not expect one person to do everything from initial search, through lab tests and suspect interviews, to arrests. Given the complexity of the crimes the CSI people are investigating, you have to laugh at the numbers involved. In Suffolk I understand they have 500 police officers working on the case – not three of four however bright and attractive.
I remember reading a while back that prosecutors were worried because juries expected all the evidence to be as complete and unambiguous as in CSI and would not convict on what, a few years ago, would have been sufficient evidence.
On the boiler suits; I am sure you are right about their use depending on the complexity of the crime. The policeman who came round to take fingerprints from our windows after a break in a few years ago did not climb into a sterile suit!
My only experience with evidence gathering is that I used to live in a bad neighborhood in DC during the drug war years. When I saw police gathering evidence at homicides, they were in dark blue overalls, similar to what a mechanic might wear, but with police insignia. As I recall, they were specially trained police officers for gathering evidence and came in a vehicle marked something like “evidence technician.”
Here’s another difference: in real life, police/crime scene techs **turn on the lights ** ! They don’t go wandering around in the dark waving a little flashlight.
One terrible weakness of CSI is that they often find electronicall stroed visual evidence, from maybe a mobile phone, cctv or something and they have this magic computer that can enhance resolution so much that things such as reflections in a pair of sunglasses etc can be blown up by an unlimited amount to produce a usable image of a perp or somesuch.
Judging by the TV series, I thought the only qualification you had to have to be a CSI operative is to have a low-cut dress and own a small flash-light. Oh yes, and a rather dodgy past, either as a stripper or gambler.
Yes, my police lab friend mentioned this trend too. Says that juries can often have unrealistic expectations about evidence.
He said that some prosecutors have a pat speech comparing TV shows ‘where all evidence is clear-cut and everything’s solved in one hour (minus commercial breaks)’ with ‘real life, where the justice system takes a long time, evidence can be contradictory, and we have to rely on the common sense of you 12 jury members to make the decisions’. They give this early in the trial to warn the jury. And some are now starting to ask him semi-humorous questions when he starts testifying:
Q; “So officer, you went out with your little flashlight and found this at the scene of the crime?”
A: “No, that’s TV shows. This was found by the officers at the crime scene, it was placed in an envelope, carefully marked by them, and delivered to me at my lab for testing.”
The point of these questions is to again remind the jury that real-life evidence is not like that on TV shows.
He also complained that Judges allowed defense lawyers to denigrate the evidence without any response, even when the statements were scientifically false.
An example he gave was the OJ Simpson murder trial, where the defense lawyers claimed the DNA evidence was unreliable, because the samples were dirty and contaminated. His comment was that DNA tests just don’t work that way! Dirt & contamination might make the DNA sample unreadable or inconclusive, but would NOT make it give an incorrect match – that just isn’t possible. Yet the Judge in that case let them make that argument to the jury.