.jpg)
In Touch with Tennessee
In Touch with Tennessee
Forensic Science Changes Over Time
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
A single blurry photo can unravel a case, and a “perfect” AI-enhanced image can be even more dangerous. We sit down with Jason Jones, training specialist with the National Forensic Academy at the University of Tennessee Law Enforcement Innovation Center, to unpack what modern forensic science really looks like when the goal is evidence that holds up in court.
Welcome And Jason’s Path
SPEAKER_01With advances in science and technological innovations, the area of forensic science to solve crimes has changed through the years. Hi, and welcome to In Touch with Tennessee, a podcast of the University of Tennessee Institute for Public Service. Joining us today is Jason Jones, a training specialist with the National Forensic Academy, a program of our Law Enforcement Innovation Center. Before joining LEIC, Jason worked for the Georgia Department of Public Safety as a criminalist and forensic instructor. At the Georgia Public Safety Training Center, he taught courses on crime scene investigation, bloodstain pattern analysis, latent print development, and basic training for coroners and death investigators. He served as a board member on the Georgia Coroners Training Council, where he was instrumental in elevating the standards for training Georgia's coroners and deputy coroners. Thanks for joining us today, Jason.
SPEAKER_00Thanks. Thanks for having me, Susan.
SPEAKER_01So I know I went over your background. If you want to tell us a little bit more about that, that'd be great.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. So I started law enforcement in 1997 as a police officer in a small town that I grew up in in the middle of Georgia. Basically, my career kind of moved around and advanced over the years and just started leading towards investigations and then into crime scene and then forensics. In 2013, I took a position with the Georgia Department of Public Safety at the training center as the forensics instructor and criminalist there. And that's where and that's kind of where I taught the uh state's crime scene investigations program. So uh the training center there teaches all local law enforcement and uh state law enforcement as well. And I taught the programs that led to a crime scene certification for state of Georgia police officers. And and and I'll talk about that a little bit more, but now it's not just police officers because now there's civilians that are in crime scene work. And then in 2018 I attended the National Forensic Academy as a student here, and then right after that I started teaching the bloodstained pattern analysis program in the National Forensic Academy.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_00Yep. And then in 2020, we there they had some positions open up out here, and the training specialist position was one of them, and I applied for it and uh moved up here in 2020. Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_01Okay, well, we're we're happy you did.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'm glad to be up here.
SPEAKER_01So tell us a little bit more about the National Forensic Academy.
Inside The National Forensic Academy
SPEAKER_00Right, yeah. So the uh National Forensic Academy is a 10-week program where we take crime scene investigators from all over the U.S. We've even had a few from um other countries, but uh we get them here for 10 weeks. We house them over in uh Knoxville at uh apartments, and we start with you know it's kind of a walk, you know, a crawl, walk, run process where we start off with just basic crime scene operations, and then we move into things like photography, which is probably one of the most critical skills that a crime scene investigator really needs to understand deeply. And then we go over latent print processing, we teach them how to map what we call forensic mapping, which is if you think about someone hand drawing a sketch of their house. It's kind of yep, it's kind of a more detailed version of that. We teach them how to use 3D software, they get uh a week of shooting incident reconstruction, they get a week of bloodstain pattern analysis, they get a week of forensic anthropology, and that includes uh lab work here looking at bones and identifying bones, and then it includes time out at our outdoor forensic site where they'll actually recover a clandestine grave that contains a human a human donor in it. And then would they get bombs and arson and you know we kind of end the class with them blowing up a car.
Photography That Preserves The Scene
SPEAKER_01So another question I want to throw at you, is kind of going back to where you talked about photography being such an important part of crime scenes. Can you speak to that just a little bit?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so you know, one of the one of the best ways that we have to record a crime scene is photographically. You know, I can go into a uh you know, a homicide and I can sit there and talk about the blood that's on the walls, and I can talk about the injuries I might see. Um, I can talk about items of evidence that may be there or may not be there, but nothing really tells that story better than taking a camera and taking photographs of it. And, you know, as as you as you well know with cameras, you know, things aren't always um they're not as easy as as as we think they are. You know, it's like cell phones have kind of fooled us over the years because you grab your cell phone out, you point it at something, you hit the button, and now you've got a picture of it. But, you know, in crime scene work, it's not just about capturing the picture of what's there. We have to capture the dimensions also. So, you know, if you take a, for example, if I just took a circle and drew it on a piece of paper, and then I took a camera and photographed that circle at a 25 or 30 degree angle, well, it's going to start to look like an oval. So we have to teach people how to get the camera film playing parallel to what we're trying to take photographs of so that we capture the dimensions. Um, and also the biggest thing that we have to teach is how to manually operate the camera, which is something outside of people that rely on a camera for a profession. A lot of people don't understand manual operation. Um like adjusting the shut or the aperture of these things. I mean, each one of these things can cause us a problem, like in you know, the aperture for it, for example, you know, it's just that fan fan-like set of blades that sit there in the lens. Well, if you know you take, you take an open an aperture up too much, and uh what happens is you wind up with some of the image potentially having a soft blur on it, or what we would call it's be it's out of focus. And when we take these photographs to court and we introduce them, we're saying to the jury and to the judge and to the court that this is a accurate and true representation of the scene. Well, if things are out of focus, then that's not a true and accurate representation. So we spend there's there's a lot of time spent on learning how to truly manually operate a camera.
SPEAKER_01Wow, okay, that's fascinating.
OJ And TV Raise The Bar
SPEAKER_01So through the years that you've worked in the area of crime scene investigation, how have you seen things change?
SPEAKER_00So there was there's been uh that's a really good question. There have been some events that have occurred over the years that had a tremendous impact on uh law enforcement and the criminal justice system and crime scene investigations. And just to kind of give you an example, when I started uh when I started policing in '97, if I arrested someone and I walked into a court and I said, I saw this person do X, Y, or Z, that was really about all you needed to get a conviction. You know, juries believed law enforcement, and and I'm not saying that they don't now, but there's much more scrutiny now than there was then. But the judge, you know, if I said, hey, this person was speeding, the judge would say, guilty, go go pay the pie. And that's changed over the years. And I think one of the catalysts that I believe started it was the O.J. Simpson trial, uh, and and which began in 1995. But you know, that thing lasted a year, that thing went on for almost a year, and it was uh, I mean, well publicized trial, and it was watched by millions of people. Um yeah, so I think you know, that brought to light a lot of a lot of forensics. You know, you you had DNA that was in that case. It also brought to light, though, that you know, DNA evidence isn't, if it's properly handled or or improperly handled or improperly stored, then maybe it's not as reliable as as it could have been. And I think that a lot of that, just the volume of people that watched that case and and some of the things that were, I don't want to say, you know, not done properly, but uh there was certainly some scrutiny in how some things were handled. I think that those things kind of are are what started the change in forensics. And you know, after that, of course, we had all the CSI shows that came about. You know, 2000 was CSI and then CSI Miami and New York, and you know, every major city had its own version of uh uh the CSI show. Those shows did a lot as far as educating citizens. You know, before before those shows and before the O.J. Simpson trial, people had probably heard of DNA, but they didn't really understand how it was used. And then you've got these television shows that are talking about DNA and they're talking about how it's used to uh match one person to a scene or match a scene. You find someone's DNA inside of a scene, and that's a pretty good indicator that they were inside of the scene. You find someone's DNA on a weapon, and that's a really good indicator that they at least had contact with the weapon. So those shows really started educating the public. And it's it also educated law enforcement. You know, there were a lot of uh, especially where I was from in Georgia, we had a lot of small town, small towns that didn't understand crime scene investigation. And this show kind of started to show to some of these uh chiefs and and uh other administrators that, hey, if you don't properly handle evidence, then you're setting yourself up for cross-contamination and creating issues in court. So it educated uh the police, it also educated the public. And these members of the public, they start showing up on juries. And you know, post post-OJ and post-crime scene investigations, the there was a study, I believe it was done by the National Institute of Justice, and what they found was that most of the times jurors expect to see some type of forensic evidence. I don't think it went so far as to say that they would be willing to acquit somebody without without forensic evidence, but jurors expect to see that now.
SPEAKER_02Well no.
SPEAKER_00So, you know, just to kind of give you a just an idea of uh of you know the kind of the jury system and jury mentality, if you charge someone with uh with a serious crime, you know, I'm just gonna say like murder or aggravated assault or something like that, and you don't have any forensic evidence at all that they did it. If their defense attorney sits there and and can convince one juror that some other person may be guilty, and if the police had looked for this DNA or if they had looked for the fingerprints, they may have found it, then that may be all it takes to get a person acquitted or at least a mistrial, so that it's not a there's no conviction there. So those have been kind of some of the monumental things that happened since I began and began in law enforcement. And I will say when it comes to the you know the CSI, they're all entertaining shows, and I think the first couple of seasons they were fairly realistic, but they're all dramatized. You know, there's the the realism takes backseat to entertainment with any television show.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so you so you can't solve a crime in an hour, is what you're saying.
SPEAKER_00No, not no, this this you know, I always like the that they send off the DNA and then they've got it back, you know, usually that same day.
SPEAKER_02Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_00And in the real world, this is the process that normally takes months.
SPEAKER_02Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_00So to the lab to get a to get a response.
SPEAKER_01So have you, you know, and as a result of this interest in in forensic investigations, have you seen a surge in in people who want to enter the field of crime scene investigation?
Growth In Forensics Careers
SPEAKER_00Oh yeah, absolutely. You know, the the whole concept of forensics has has evolved now to the point that, you know, there are colleges that are teaching uh courses that revolve around forensic science. Now, you know, I'll I'll see a lot of times these are they're criminal justice programs is is what they are, that are kind of shaped with a little bit more physical science embedded in them. But you've got that, you've got agencies that are expanding their crime scene investigations unit. I mean, you've got agencies now that uh 10 years ago didn't have a crime scene investigations unit at all, and now they're you know hiring people to come in and and fill those roles and positions. So, you know, right now is if this is something that someone was interested in, it it's a good time for you because uh there is such an expansion right now.
SPEAKER_01So, what are some of the challenges that are faced by crime scene investigators?
Burnout And Mental Fatigue Risks
SPEAKER_00One of the biggest things that they face is just mental fatigue. You know, a lot of a lot of people think that you've got this crime scene investigator who's sitting in an office and they are just waiting for you to call them to go out and work a crime scene. And the reality is, and and this isn't the same for every office throughout the U.S., obviously, but most right now, most law enforcement agencies hire crime scene investigators and they work Monday through Friday, eight to five. Well, that's great if the murder that you need solved happens Monday through Friday between five. But a lot of times these things happen, you know, at two or three in the morning, nine o'clock at night, ten o'clock at night. So these investigators have already worked a day. They go home, they get in bed, they get about two hours of sleep, and then the phone calls, uh, the phone rings, and they have to get up and go deal with a homicide or you know, one of these, and then there are things that are much, much worse than homicides that they have to deal with. And it's just not as uh, you know, it's not a job where you're gonna go in and work from eight o'clock to five o'clock and then go home and and be untouched by it. So that right there it piles up on a lot of them and they get they just get mental fatigue, they get burned out. A lot of these, uh, as I said, we're kind of in a we're kind of in a transition right now with agencies that are starting these crime scene investigative units, or maybe they've had one for a couple of years. And one of the things that they're learning is, you know, having two or three investigators and trying to rotate them out to be on call for a week at a time or two weeks at a time, they're they're burning them out pretty quickly. So there's gonna have to be some, you know, there's gonna have to be some changes in those areas. I don't know if that means the units are gonna have to expand or be more flexible with time or you know, be more giving with off time, but uh but that's really about the only way to combat that uh mental fatigue, you see. And then the other thing is uh you know just the the nature of what these crime scene investigators are asked to do will certainly take a toll on folks. You know, and it's the same with police officers. Police officers see stuff every day that uh that no person should have to see. I mean, then they're kind of having this stuff thrown at them daily. And crime scene investigators is as much, if not more so, when it comes to that, you know, just see seeing traumatic events day after day after day.
SPEAKER_01Right. So, how
AI Drones And 3D Crime Scenes
SPEAKER_01do you see this area of of crime scene investigation changing in the next five years, for instance? How will law enforcement be able to use AI in crime solving?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so well, AI is that's one of those double-edged swords right there. But yeah, I I I say that, but I'm I'll be honest with you. You know, law enforcement's gonna adopt AI in some aspects, and criminals are gonna use AI. As a matter of fact, generally criminals are much better at adopting technology than the government is.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00They jumped on AI very, very quickly. But you know, it's always been like that. You know, the banks gave us credit cards, criminals gave us credit card fraud. So, you know, with any advancement, there's gonna be that. But, you know, one of the one of the areas that I see AI being of assistance is in uh things like fingerprint searches. So there's a little bit of probably misconception in how people think that fingerprints get searched in databases. And what people generally think happens is, or what CSI shows us is the investigator goes to the scene, they throw the magic powder on whatever it is they're trying to find a fingerprint on, and boom, a beautiful edge-to-edge rolled fingerprint shows up that looks like someone inked it and rolled it themselves. And then they lift it and they throw it into a magic machine, and the machine tells them who to go arrest. And that is probably the biggest simplification in forensics that I have seen that's completely inaccurate. So there is an automated database, and it's changed over the years. It's pretty pretty advanced now. But basically the way it works is you take a digital image of a fingerprint, you put it into this machine, and then this machine starts to look at the ridge characteristics of the fingerprint, and it looks for things that we call minutiae, which is just like where an end may on your friction-rich skin, you know, your fingerprint ridges may end, or maybe it splits into two, or maybe it splits into two and then goes back into one. And we have we have names for all those different characteristics that you might see. So, what this machine does is it finds those points that we call minutia, and it matches them to these millions and millions and millions of fingerprints that have been collected throughout the decades. And what it gives you is a list of potential suspects or potential matches, I shouldn't say suspects, uh potential. And then a person who is chained uh trained in uh fingerprint identification sits down and goes through, it takes the fingerprint that you lifted from the scene and it goes through those fingerprint cards of these people that this database says that this potentially could match, and it tries to see if uh if a person is there. So, you know, it may give you 10, 20, 30, 40 potential potential. Sometimes it's a lot more, depending on how much detail is in the fingerprint. But a person is the one that actually has to sit down and make that connection. The the database just narrows the search field for you. That's all it does. So I think AI may have a role in that because you know it can it can be taught what to look for and how to exclude and things like that. Now, ultimately, I don't think it's going to replace a uh an analyst. As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure it never will. We're always going to have to have someone that sits down and and looks at it. Now, the flip side to AI, and this is something that um worry about, you know, we were talking about cameras earlier and digital single lens reflex cameras are now mirrorless cameras that we encourage people to use in crime scenes. Well, you know, the new cell phones have really amazing cameras in them. And we have historically and continue to discourage people from using cell phones to take any type of crime scene photograph.
SPEAKER_02Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And there's a lot of reasons behind it. One is, you know, even as advanced as a cell phone camera is, you still lose a lot of control over it whenever you're trying to take photographs. So like the ISO may run itself up to give yourself a little bit more light. And when you do things like that, it creates these artifacts in the image. You know, we'd call it grainy or whatever. And we don't want that. We don't want images that look grainy. You know, it may look great on a phone, but then when you blow it up for a jury to see, it looks distorted. And we don't want that.
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_00So, you know, we try to discourage cell phones uh for that reason, but the other is just courtroom discovery reasons. Like there is uh potentially an argument, and I don't know that it's ever worked, but if you use your cell phone to take crime scene photographs, then perhaps your cell phone might wind up in evidence for for a prosecutor and a defense attorney to go through and see what all is on it. And you know, I don't know that that's ever happened, but that's always been an argument that we've that we hear. But the thing that uh the the thing that going back to AI that does concern me is cell phones that have integrated with AI, and I don't I don't want to mention any particular brands and and get in trouble with anything, but there was an instance in uh 2013, I think it was 2013-2014, of a cell phone manufacturer that was using AI in their or using a type of AI, I should say, in their in their camera. And basically what would happen is if you were trying to take a photograph of, let's say, the moon, well, you would point your camera at the moon and take a photograph, and you would get this beautiful picture of the moon. And uh there was a Reddit user that basically did an experiment in his in his apartment where he turned all the lights off, he took a flashlight, shined it at the wall, goodness, yeah, pointed his camera at it, and got a beautiful picture of the moon. Oh goodness. Yeah, so uh basically the way this uh phone was creating these images is it would recognize what you were trying to photograph and then give you what you were trying to photograph. Now that's kind of advanced over the years and and and there's uh you know, this was off of I read this on Samsung's website that it uses AI and its cameras now, the Galaxy series cameras, to enhance photographs. And the way it does it is a little bit differently than what I was describing just a second ago, but basically it takes a series of photographs and kinds of basically stacks them and fills in detail. But but the issue that that I'm concerned about from a crime scene perspective is you know, if I'm using that type of technology to photograph a crime scene, how do I know that not just creating a photographic record or am I getting a computer generated image? And and that, you know, that's a huge concern to me, especially when you're talking about things like fingerprints. Like, can you imagine if you know this this in during the enhancement process, AI decides that a ridge needs to be here or there, or that you know, this was supposed to be some of that minutiae that we talked about. To me, that's a concern when it comes to artificial intelligence in the photography realm. But as far as things like uh searches, I'm I'm thinking that uh AI is going to do well there. I do a lot with bloodstain pattern analysis, and you know, bloodstained pattern analysis is essentially a classification system. You look at bloodstains that are present and the patterns they create, and you classify them as to what most likely created them. And that's something that AI, at least at the very most most basic level, would probably be able to do. Right, really, it could probably do it now, but I think in the in the next coming years, it would probably be able to do that pretty well.
SPEAKER_01Wow, okay. Well, how I mean, how in what other ways do you maybe see crime scene investigation changing in the future?
SPEAKER_00You know, this it's funny. The a lot of the stuff that we do, especially like in latent print processing, that stuff has been around since the 80s. Um we use the same kind of techniques there. The biggest advances we've seen have all been technology related, like you know, the use of drones now to photograph outdoor scenes. They can give you a really good top-down image. And then we use a technique called photogametry, which just stitches photographs together and can give you a really large, like if you've got a really large, you know, car crash on the interstate, and there's, you know, there was fog, and now there's 30 cars that have hit each other.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_00Uh you know, we can put a drone up in the air and photograph that whole thing. You know, just take segmented photo photographs, you know, starting at one end and progressing down the interstate, and then take this, take software and stitch all those photographs together and create one continuous image. So drones and they're going to continue, drones are going to continue to be a part of forensics. Another advance that we've had are 3D scanners. So 3D scanners, they're devices that we can set inside of a room, and basically you turn it off and it begins to shoot lasers, it shoots a laser out of it, and using basically using math and speed of light calculations, it records all the points in the room from the laser. So basically it's taking, you know, just to sketch a room by hand, I take a tape measure and I measure out all the walls, and then I measure the ceiling, and then I measured all the furniture. And I may take 100 or 150 measurements inside that crime scene, but this scanner can take hundreds of thousands and into millions of measurements in in just a few minutes. And then using uh again, using software to kind of stitch some of the images together, you're able to take those images, create a 3D environment, and now you can show that to a jury, you know, move it around. You could take measurements from inside of it, so there's not as much of a need to hand measure things. Right. And this these devices are much more accurate than I could ever be with a tape measure. I mean, it's you know, down to one hundredth of an inch at, you know, five hundred feet, where it whereas, you know, I'm you know, I can be a half an inch or a quarter inch off, and you know, with no problem, you know, easily I can make that kind of error in my measurements. These things are incredible at measuring.
SPEAKER_01Well, that's great.
Final Takeaways And Where To Listen
SPEAKER_01I appreciate you stopping by and talking to us today. We've I know I've learned quite a bit, and I hope our listeners will learn learn as much as I did. And thank you, listeners, for joining us. Be sure to look for In Touch with Tennessee, where you find your favorite podcast. And Jason, thank you for joining us.
SPEAKER_00Hey, Susan, thanks for having me. I really enjoyed it.
