Real life vs CSI (and other procedurals)

Cafe Society
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CSI: A team of forensic experts descends on a crime scene with all their gadgets. Blood evidence is found at the scene and collected. Back at the lab the sample is handed over to the hot but nerdy tech who drops in a machine that goes ping. Then she waves her hand in the air to use the virtual holographic keyboard. Viola! The blood comes back to John Smith who has a lengthy rap sheet and his address and work history pops right up. Lets go pick him up!

Real life: The first week of August 2015 I get woken up in the middle of the night to process a burglary scene. Fantastic, I hate being on call. When I finally get to headquarters (live about 30 minutes away) I get a quick briefing. Someone broke into a business through a glass door and left blood behind. So I go rifling through the office of our evidence guy attempting to find the property equipment to collect the evidence. Eventually I find it and head out to the scene. I photograph and attempt to find prints. No prints. They are not as easy to find as on tv even when they don’t wear gloves. I manage to collect three blood samples for redundancy. I drop the samples into evidence that night and that week the evidence guy brings the samples down to the State Police lab.

This week 11 months later I get notice that DNA was extracted from the sample and that the DNA profile will be entered into CODIS. The notice says if I have a possible suspect I could turn in a sample for comparison. 8 months ago we identified a guy through other means and he confessed. He has already been convicted. The guy is a registered sex offender so I know his DNA is already on file. Let’s see how long before there is a hit in CODIS from the blood sample. I’m guessing at least several months from now.

And yes, juries expect real police work to be like CSI.

2

I like when they pronounce ELISA as e-Lee-sa.

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Let’s assume, for arguments sake, that the DNA sample doesn’t produce a hit, what then? Sure, the guy confessed but false confessions is supposedly a common occurrence. What happens to the results after the case is closed. Can it be thrown away, ignored, or is there an obligation to inform the convict’s lawyer, if he has one?

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False confessions do happen but they are not common. Any good interviewer will make sure to cover that in the interview. It’s not “I did it” case closed. You then have to go through the details of the crime and let him describe everything he did. Not so much to guard against a false confession although that has to remain a possibility, it’s in case he later decides to fight it in court anyway. I confession with no details isn’t worth much when played to a jury.

In this case that’s not going to be a factor. There was clear surveillance video of the entire burglary. Initially we didn’t know who it was but when his name came up through other information it was clearly him in the video. When confronted with the video he confessed.

If hypothetically in another similar case DNA came back to someone else I would immediately let the prosecutor know. Then he would do his lawyer stuff. He has a responsibility to see that justice is done. If his first step would be to contact the court or another lawyer I’m not sure. It also doesn’t necessarily mean innocence in all cases. There could have been two or more suspects.

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Did you at least say “I’m getting too old for this shit” during the course of the initial call?

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Per union contract, cops are only allowed to say that when they’re two weeks from retirement.

What are the most commons ways CSI is useful?

What pieces of evidence do they most commonly provide?

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When I had jury duty, the state’s attorney repeatedly said “This isn’t like Law & Order/CSI/NCIS/Whatever…” but you could tell by comments some other jurors made that they watched far too much TV. He did tell us that in our state DNA results could take a year or more to come back.

I do love the TV shows where a few keystrokes bring up education history, employment history, previous arrests, gang connections, and what the suspect had for supper the night before (according to his credit card, of course.) Too much silliness.

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In Homicide, they had cops sitting at their desk, thumbing through little boxes full of index cards, for whole episodes.

It was less a procedural than it was a “people talking about random stuff” show.

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Just curious if you use any Promega products? I had their CEO in my Uber a couple of months back and we had a rather long and very pleasant chat. Seems they’re very big in producing forensic test kits.

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I’m a little surprised the testing was actually done. In one of the few “street” crime cases I’ve worked on, a condition of the defendant’s plea was giving up the right to have the evidence tested for his DNA. It’s a risk to both sides, hence the more favorable sentencing.

What purpose did the ongoing testing serve in your case?

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I hope this isn’t considered a hi-jack, but did you see “The Making of a Serial Killer” on Netflix, and if so, what are your thoughts on the Nephew’s “confession”?

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Homicide was based on a very good non-fiction book (Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets) in which David Simon spent a year with Baltimore Homicide. The show started off as true to life as a TV show could be but got less so as the seasons went on. For instance in the beginning some cases were solved immediately, some took several episodes, some never were. With marginal ratings they started to make it a more audience friendly case gets wrapped up in 40 minutes show.

I have not seen it. I prefer that my off time is not spent thinking about work topics.

The testing was already in the works before he was identified through other means and by the time of the sentencing I was far removed from the case. I don’t think at that point anyone was thinking about the DNA.

Another CSI vs reality: I once managed to get some fingerprints from a burglary scene. They were entered into AFIS. Now of course nothing will come up unless the suspect had been fingerprinted before. Well my suspect did. I got a hit confirmation 8 months later. There was no scene with the lab tech in front of a computer with prints rapidly scrolling past.

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As a moderator, Loach, I’d assume you know better than any of us where a thread belongs, but this thread almost seems like too much of an assault on ignorance to be in a place as flippant Cafe Society.

So you work in a crime lab? Now that I’m thinking back, maybe you did show up in those GQ threads with Bricker and the other folks that do law enforcement related things (police officers, judges, lawyers, etc.), and I just never realized what you did.

There aren’t enough threads about anime, Warhammer 40,000, or rabbits for me to fight a whole lot of ignorance on a regular basis.

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Since this is about what happens on those types of TV shows I think it belongs here. I am a detective but generally don’t handle cases that require evidence collection but in a pinch or when I’m on call I do it. I know about my narrow lane but I’m hardly a subject matter expert about crime scene investigations.

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IME, time delays in DNA are dependent upon size of the community policed and budget.

Cases can obviously be solved without DNA (cite - All of History prior to the 1990s.)

But DNA does serve many purposes. It typically forces the accused down a more difficult “path of least resistance”, where he might not want to go. For example, in a rape case, he might have been a stranger committing the offence in the dark, so that the traditional ID evidence might have been thin. He initially denies being involved. Then the DNA identifies him. Now, he is forced to a more difficult path of least resistance - he has to say either that the DNA is wrong (a very tough battle to fight), or say it was him, but she consented, in which case he will have to explain why he lied earlier AND why the complainant is covered in injuries.

In a murder case, he might have to explain how his wife’s blood was found in the boot of his car when he said she just went for a walk. Prior to DNA, the best that could be said was that the blood was consistent with that of the wife’s ABO type, which had very low discriminating power, and the chance of a convincing explanation might have been easier if the blood only had to be attributed to someone with the same ABO type.

Of course it is always possible to come up with some sort of explanation (“She must have cut herself getting the shopping out one day”) but that doesn’t mean it has to be accepted. The difficulty is that that sort of piecemeal explanation of all the little details in the case tends rapidly to become increasingly unlikely.

Other species of forensic chemistry include blood analysis (eg, to determine that the deceased died of opiate poisoning).

Forensic pathologists have their own suite of stuff, like aging of corpses, and a whole bunch of stuff that is probably not really what you were interested in.

Forensic entomologists do the fly larvae thing of aging corpses, within wide limits (no Aha! This larva means the deceased died exactly 95 hours and 20 minutes ago!)

Blood spatter evidence is not uncommon, but it is usually of no great value except at the most general level. The idea that you can look at the blood at the scene and create a reconstruction movie in 3D of everyone’s movements to the mm is ridiculous. By that I mean I am sure you can have a go at creating such a movie. The extent to which it reflects reality is entirely arbitary.

At arson scenes, crime scene guys can often give evidence of the point of origin of a fire and whether there were multiple points of ignition, the presence or otherwise of accelerants, exclusion of possible alternative causes of origin like electrical failure, and to some degree reconstruct where various items were. An example of that last might be if there is controversy over whether an object such as a refrigerator was on a wooden landing before the fire or was always on the ground below the landing where it was found afterwards. If fire debris is found underneath the object, then clearly it fell through the floor.

Not really CSI stuff, but increasingly common is cell tower evidence (with all its understood limitations) of a person’s movements and a phone’s internal tracking of its movements by GPS.

I’m sure there are plenty of other bits and pieces, but those are the things that occur to me now as most prominent.

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Something I’ve wondered about; which television show or movie most accurately describes the work of a police detective?

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Question: my grandmother’s apartment was robbed. The intruder left very noticeable fingerprints on the glass sliding doors. When my grandmother pointed this out, the cop said, “You watch too much TV.”

Is that a case of a lazy cop ignoring useful evidence since it was “just” a burglary, or are fingerprints on glass actually not very useful?

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Weird. When my friend’s apartment got burglarized, she said the cops were there all morning tossing what what left of her home, and when they were gone she had to clean the whole place up from floor to ceiling because they’d left graphite powder everywhere. But at the same time told her there was very little chance of ever seeing her stuff back or anybody being found.
I think she was ultimately more pissed about the powder than the missing TV :stuck_out_tongue:

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Probably Dragnet. Mundane cases, no shootouts, paperwork.

Now whether the show reflected the actual character of the LAPD in the late 60s I can’t say. Sometimes I fear LA Confidential gave a more realistic presentation of the character of a typical LAPD officer.

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Of course, a real forensics lab could do all of the stuff described in the OP. They could probably even do it nearly as quickly as they do it on TV… if the case was important enough to jump to the head of the line and get priority treatment. But real police are investigating a whole lot of crimes at once, and they only have so many resources, and so you have to wait in line.

On fingerprints, once when I was a kid our home was broken into. The police were able to find prints, and we had a likely suspect, a local youth who was never up to much good. We knew that said suspect had run afoul of the law before, and so had his fingerprints on record, but we were told that the police were not allowed to compare his prints to those found on the scene, because that would be a violation of his privacy rights. They told us that the only way they were allowed to actually use the prints was to match them to those found at other crime scenes, and thus to establish a connection between the crimes.