I’m amazed in the days of digital cameras that the Jackson trial has exhibits of crudely drawn crime scene depictions. Especially for a Murder trial.
Is there a legal reason cops can’t use the camera in their IPhone? I would expect having a personal camera in their pocket would be a tremendous asset for any detective. Has the courts taken away this tool?
If this wasn’t a murder case these drawings would be laughable.
I need to clarify. The drawings were from a witness at the scene.
I know the police also have crime scene photographers.
I’m just wondering if cops/detectives can use their own camera phones to document details in a crime scene. Something they can use in addition to the formal crime scene photos.
Also, can patrol officers take photos of people they stop? For example a suspect on the street that they question and don’t arrest. Seems like that would be useful for the cops report.
If they have crime scene photographers, why would they need to use their iPhones? Also, wouldn’t it be problematic if they were using their own personal phones (risk of them getting out, etc.)?
Some do take pictures with their phones. And sometimes those photos get passed around. Here’s a recent case in St. Louis. There are many more examples to be found on the interwebs.
I just thought it would be useful to quickly take a digital shot of something rather than waiting around for a police photographer to show up.
It’s like typing your own short letter instead of dictating something to a secretary. It’s less hassle to do a small job yourself.
No. Not only do camera phones take shitty pictures, but most people have no clue how to take decent photographs (cite: any social networking site on the Internet). The last thing you would want would be some dark, out of focus, crappy camera pic snapped by a cop when you are trying to build evidence that’s admissible in a court of law.
From what I’ve seen L.A. cops take their own pictures with a separate digital camera they keep in their patrol car. But depending on the nature of the incident one particular cop has the job of doing that typically when a report is made. I don’t know if that person is really a “police photographer” rather than just an investigator.
Not sure if this is relevant but pictures can be drawn retrospectively from recollection, photographs must be taken then and there and may interfere with what you need to do immediately.
To establish chain of custody with photo evidence, each photo is usually logged individually as well as part of a whole chain of photos. It isn’t like TV with people just meandering around with cameras. You need to be able to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that any individual photo was actually taken at the scene of the crime, and the general location of the camera (and a bunch more crap that a defense lawyer will pick apart).
I’m not a detective or anything, but I had to take a modified police powers class for investigating fires. I can’t remember the exact details but the photography was very methodic. An example would be, taking a picture facing the cardinal points of a compass (north, south,…) while working around the scene clockwise and stopping on an imaginary 3 o’clock, 9 o’clock, ect. You would do this once at say 50’ out and then again 20’, than 10’. Once the location of everything was established than individual evidence was documented. Each picture was logged and the sequence was mapped.
All this is for the trial, defense lawyers are nasty. For the average cop he won’t see the pics until later and he wants to start interviewing suspects now. All he really needs to know is a rough outline of events to follow avenues in questioning.
The department I retired from forbade using digital cameras because the images could be manipulated so easy. A lot of law enforcement agency have [had] the same policy but this has changed for many of them.
After I retired I took a part-time patrol gig with another department. We can use digital cameras but if we do we also have to use a 35mm (:rolleyes: ).
Both agencies require officers or investigators to also make drawings in their daybooks.
35mm? Fucking amateurs! You should be using a Speed Graphic. Fedora and cigar should also be mandatory!
This is the key point to answering your OP question, though not the underlying one of use of photography in police investigations.
While crime scene photography can produce a much better – from both aesthetic and practical considerations – imagery of a crime scene than crude drawings, the one thing they cannot do is to report the testimony of the witness who drew the drawings. That is why the drawings are relevant – they represent the observations of an eyewitness.
Of course the position of the camera is important in certain cases, but “chain of custody” isn’t something we worry about with photo evidence, because the photos aren’t physical evidence in the same way that, say, a crack pipe taken from the scene is physical evidence. For the pipe, you need to establish the chain of custody to ensure that it hasn’t been tampered with. For photographs, you just ask any person who was there: “Does this photograph fairly and accurately depict what you saw on night X?” And if the answer is “yes”, the photo is deemed reliable enough to be admitted as evidence.
The questions we have to ask in order to establish the reliability of evidence are called “predicates”, and the predicate for photographs is about the shortest and simplest there is. There will, however, be hell to pay if a defense attorney finds out that photos were taken that he didn’t receive in discovery, and if he starts crowing in front of the jury about how Officer Headscratch took a bunch of pictures and the State didn’t turn them over, it looks like the prosecution is hiding something. That’s why you don’t want a bunch of yahoos strolling around taking pictures.
Besides the alignment of photos to compass points, doesn’t a scale of measurement also need to be included?
