i work in the field of forensics and can testify as to what a total steaming pile of nonsense CSI is
for a start...in the UK at least in large forensic labs...the scenes of crime personnel only collect the evidence and submit it to the labs...it is the job of the forensic scientist to analyse and interpret that evidence...the difference if that the lab workers tend to be educated to masters or PhD level in chemistry of biology but the scenes of crime officers are taken mostly from police backgrounds or other professions with useful skills such as professional photographers
neither make any assumptions about what happened at a scene...its not even about catching someone...its about collecting and analysing the evidence then performing statistical tests on the results to see if it supports or refutes the chances that person A is likely to have done specific acts in the crime scene
forensic work makes no assumptions to guilt or innocence because it deals only with the forensic evidence and doesn't take into account other evidence such as witness testimonies
i'll give an example
if a person breaks into a window then there has been research done as to how much glass would be caught in their clothes...there is also been lots of research on how likely sample of glass from those clothes would match a sample of glass from the window it's supposedly from
the forensic scientist tests both by various means (bayes theorum statistics is the emerging primary method) and gives a log scale potential ranging from 1,000,000 100,000, 10,000, 1000, 100, 10 0 and then the opposite in the negative side...range from 1,000,000 being extremely strong support that person A was near the window when it was broken...through strong, moderately strong, moderate, etc....0 being no evidence either way...and then the negatives showing support that the person was not there when the window was broken
not easy to get your head around but for court purposes it works well as its a method that judge, jury, lawyers etc can all work toward a standard
working in the forensics field though, there is such a thing we call "the CSI effect" whereby jurys put huge emphasis on forensic evidence because they think CSI and thus forensics is infallible...it's far from it
What's your exact job? My friends just started work in Forensics, she's so happy.
Scenes of crime workers have to have at least GCSEs to work in the job and then trained on the job, last time I looked it up for when I was looking for crime photography work.
Might be a steaming pile of nonsense, but it is still a well made entertaining series to watch that's a HOUR long each episode.
🙂
Originally posted by MildPossession
What's your exact job? My friends just started work in Forensics, she's so happy.Scenes of crime workers have to have at least GCSEs to work in the job and then trained on the job, last time I looked it up for when I was looking for crime photography work.
Might be a steaming pile of nonsense, but it is still a well made entertaining series to watch that's a HOUR long each episode.
🙂
i'm currently a questioned document examiner but i also work as a part of a small private fire investigation team but that's about to come to an end as the fire services are about to employ their own in-house fire investigators...those 2 aspects are my "specialties" along with fingerprints
yeah GCSE or highers minimum but most of it is on job training...the problem being that getting the job in the 1st place has very little to do with grades and alot more to do with practical skills that transfer to the job...like photography as i mentioned
not sure if there is much call for specifically crime scene photographers though as it's usually incorporated into the remit of a scenes of crime officer (the UK title of a crime scene investigator)
perhaps in the bigger forces such as the MET maybe they have more specific roles
personally i'm hoping to join the forensic science service or the home office development branch and research and implement new standards such as optical coherence tomography and multispectral imaging analysis
i find the field work boring and this puts me in a minority as most of my university contemporaries prefer the scenes of crime work although the competition is much higher for those positions thanks to the likes of CSI making them popular