Posts
Is real-life forensic work anything like what's shown on CSI and other crime lab TV shows? The real scientists say no.
Helen Newman, the public-relations spokeswoman at Forensic Alliance, cautions against any notion of sugary TV fantasy matching reality. A significant proportion of [forensics work] is incredibly routine and repetitive, she says.
Forensic Alliance, a firm that provides services for police forces in England and Wales, employs about 600 scientists. A reporter followed one of the scientists for a day to find out what working in a crime lab is really like.
Fibres collected at a crime scene were taken back to the lab for analysis. A single strand took half an hour to analyse, and about a dozen were gathered at the scene. So, that scientist will spend his entire day inspecting fibres.
Another technician was examining a small knapsack for fibres and hair.
The technician says this one article will probably take her about five hours to examine. For the case she is working on, she says, the police have delivered about 10 batches of evidence, each containing about 10 items.
She'll be bagging fibres and hair forever.
And then there's DNA analysis.
In Hollywood, matching the DNA profile of a bloodstain at a crime scene to that of a suspect is done in near-real time. In reality, it's a much more pedantic and time-consuming affair. If it's done on a rush, [a profile usually] will take 48 hours, but the fastest we have been able to do this is six hours, says Roy Green, a forensic biologist and the chief DNA man at Forensic Alliance.
This work sounds really boring–almost as boring as one of those TV shows. But I could be wrong. Some people have told me they think statistics sounds boring. Little do they know.
