Crime Scene Processing

In this episode, I will describe the steps police take when they process a crime scene.  

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Have you ever wondered what law enforcement is removing from homes or businesses when they serve search warrants and they're coming out with boxes full of stuff? You probably know it's evidence, but I'll talk about what they can take during a search warrant when I answer the question at the end of the podcast. So do you think fingerprints are a good way to catch a criminal? What does DNA stand for? Most people have heard the term, but don't really know what it stands for. Before I start, I want to let you guys know I have an email address that you can send questions or comments to now. It is insidecp81 at gmail.com. So insidec81 at gmail.com if you have questions or comments. Hello and welcome to Inside the Criminal Process, a podcast where I discuss and explain the criminal justice system in America using real-life examples and true crime cases. My name is Scott. I'm a 29-year veteran law enforcement officer and an attorney. I've worked in various roles. And one of those roles was as a crime scene investigator. And today I'm going to tell you what the police do when they process a crime scene. So using an example, when I was in training with the second police department that I worked at, I responded to a shooting with my field training officer. We arrived, it was a very chaotic scene. It was a high school party, and there was about 50 kids running around screaming and crying outside. We found out there were people shot in the basement of the house. There was a kid who had been shot in the chest on the front lawn, and just an atmosphere of absolute panic and just chaos. My training officer grabbed a roll of crime scene tape, told me to drape it around the entire house and include the front and backyards. So that's what I started working on. We then went down into the basement after I got that done. And one thing I noticed immediately down there, there was a heap of shoes right at the base of the stairs, the very first stair going upstairs. Had a big old pile of shoes, all kinds of shoes. We had to use buses, like city buses, to transport the witnesses downtown. And I found out later that uh many of the kids had no shoes, or they only had one shoe on when they got downtown to the police station. And uh so they had literally ran out of their shoes trying to get out of the basement when the shooting started. The the shooting was in the basement of the house, and when that started, kids just there was a wave of kids running towards those stairs, and they had literally run out of their shoes. It was it was something I had never seen before. So me and my training officer were in the basement, and there was a kid that was obviously deceased in the middle of the floor. He had been shot in the head. Uh there was water running in with the bathroom downstairs because someone had broken the toilet and a pipe under the sink. Uh as I walked around the basement to check the rooms, I looked into the first room and I heard someone quietly saying, Help, help me, help me. I shone my flashlight in and saw a young man sitting on a bed holding his leg. He said, I've been shot. Uh he'd been shot right in the thigh. So it turns out this was the same kid, oddly enough, that had been shot in the head several years earlier at a liquor store. But I didn't find that out until later. So we get the paramedics down, and they get the kid who had been shot in the leg. When they brought him out of the room, the he looked at the the young man that was on the floor, and it was his nephew. So he, of course, freaked out. Um wasn't wasn't aggressive towards the paramedics or towards us, but he was just he was obviously you know traumatized because of seeing his nephew dead on the floor. So the very first step um is is complete at this point. We've uh we made sure the injured people are tended to, made sure there's no dangers associated with the scene. Uh, you know, you gotta just look for stuff like uh, well, in in, for example, like meth labs, there's gases and chemicals that that may be dangerous to people. Uh some scenes may have bombs, booby traps, any other dangers associated that that may hurt somebody that's coming into the scene. You gotta make sure those are all secured or or dealt with, and then you secure the scene so that we there are officers posted on the perimeter of the scene and at the front and back doors, and at least one officer is tasked with keeping a crime scene log, and they document anyone coming into or going out of the scene and the time that they entered or exit exited. There's also like a heading on the on the crime scene log that where there's a space for um the location, obviously, uh even what the weather is like, the temperature, is it humid, just different things that uh that people may kind of forget over the years, and they can look back and uh figure out times, dates, and stuff of that nature. So the crime lab detectives arrived at this agency. All the crime lab workers, the technicians or the people that process the evidence in the crime scenes, um, they were detectives. I think they changed that several years ago, and the people are no longer detectives, they're technicians, and they're no longer sworn employees. And when I say sworn, I mean employees that are required to raise their hands or hand and take an oath to serve and protect. Uh, not every employee at a law enforcement agency is sworn. So when you hear numbers of employees at law enforcement agencies, they'll talk about sworn and non-sworn employees at the police departments. Detectives do an initial walkthrough just to get a general idea of what they're dealing with and to preliminarily identify evidence or potential evidence at the this agency. They use little markers that are plastic, yellow, um little yellow plastic pieces shaped like a V with numbers on them. And they start placing those markers next to or near anything that needs to be photographed, collected, or processed. And the markers are placed with the open end down, so they look like a bunch of little tents at the crime scene. And you've you may have seen this before, or or maybe not. The entire scene is photographed and videotaped prior to touching or moving anything. Um, other detectives are taking measurements, they're sketching the scene, identifying, like in this case, there was a bullet hole in the wall, and so they were using the these long rods to figure out the angle at which the bullet went into the wall. Um they were getting into the wall, the sawing into the wall to recover the bullet after that area was photographed. Sketching crime scenes. I don't know if that's a thing anymore with all the the um 3D imaging and all the the high-speed digital cameras, but um at least one person was usually sketching the scene, and that's usually to scale so that you can get a spatial orientation and see where everything is in relation to each other. It just it just it complements the video and the in the photography, the photograph evidence. After the photographs and video, uh evidence that needs to be collected is packaged, and and on the package there's like an item number, time, date, location, case number, suspect, if any, owner of the piece of evidence, if known, um description of the evidence, name and badge number of the person packaging the evidence. And there's usually spaces on the evidence container, whatever you package it in. Um we use plastic and paper bags, and there's lines on there that can document transfer of the evidence. So some evidence goes directly to the property bureau, and when the officer gets to the station, they take it to the property bureau, hand it over to the property technician for storage, and they sign on there that they received it at this date and this time, and the officer puts on there that he surrendered it to the property bureau on this date at this time, and it just keeps a it keeps a running record of who has touched that evidence, where it's been, and and just keeps it so that the the evidence, the integrity of the evidence is not questioned in court. So that all that usually happens in in the case of a homicide specifically after the medical examiner or the coroner has responded and removed the body. Um in this state, once somebody is pronounced dead, the coroner or the medical examiner has jurisdiction over the body. There's there's one county that has a medical examiner in this state, all the rest are coroners. They have the same, basically, there is a coroner statute within the the revised statutes, and um the coroners have to abide by that. The medical examiner does, they don't have to abide by it, but they they generally do. There's there's really not a big difference between the medical examiner's office and a coroner's office, um, other than the fact that the medical examiner for that city and county is is an actual medical doctor. The coroners in this state are are elected, and they usually have doctors that will come in and perform autopsies for them. So they have jurisdiction over body as soon as it's pronounced dead, and it just depends on the the county that you're dealing with. I've dealt with um coroner investigators that get really, really possessive. Um, I once finger printed a person that had died in the hospital uh who was on end-of-life care, and the coroner acted like I had uh ruined the investigation. He threw a fit, called my supervisor. It was a whole big deal. So I never touched touched another dead body until the coroner or medical examiner had done their thing. And so most of the investigators though that work for the coroner's office or the medical examiner's office are are they easy to work with, and they come in and and you know they do their thing. They're not gonna balk about about somebody taking uh you know doing something small, like taking prints on on a case that's not really probably wasn't even gonna go to autopsy because the person was was already at the at um in hospice. So and the purpose of the medical examiner and the coroner is to determine cause and manner of death of the decedent. So the cause of death is a specific injury or a disease or condition that directly leads to a person's demise. It it answers the question of what caused the death. Um, and you know, the common causes are heart attack, gunshot wound, pneumonia, blunt force trauma. So if somebody dies from a heart attack, the cause of death is the actual heart attack. So the manner of death categorizes the circumstander circumstances under which the death occurred. So it answers the question of basically how the death happened and provides context for the cause of death. Manner has five different categories: there's accidental, suicide, natural, homicide, or undetermined. So again, cause is what caused the death or why the person died. Manner are the circumstances surrounding the death. Um say a person is shot, the cause of death is a gunshot wound. The manner would be classified as a homicide, suicide, accidental, or possibly even undetermined. It it depends. So depending on the crime, obviously, the items collected as evidence can include in this case, it was all of the shoes. They collected all the shoes and any bloody clothing or bedding where the kid was that was shot sitting on the bed. They they collected all that bedding that was that had blood on it. But things that they collect typically uh in different different cases or shell casings. We had some in this case, bullet fragments, we had some in this case, uh pieces of carpet with blood stains, weapons, tools, broken glass, biological evidence for DNA, obviously, uh trace evidence. So like in a sex assault, when they take the bedding, they they package it up a certain way and take that and give it to the lab. And then the lab can use different ways of getting the evidence off of the off of the bedding. Like they have these um high-tech vacuum cleaners with filters that will catch um any hairs or biological evidence. You can use alternative light sources to to see the evidence. Um other evidence that that may be available to be collected as impression evidence footprints, um, some tool marks, like in burglaries, vehicle tire tracks, and those are usually those are usually collected by doing a casting or with photography. And there's documentary evidence, digital evidence, chemical evidence, uh, controlled substances, and just about anything else that's associated with the crime that you're that you're investigating, you want to take. So when I was collecting evidence, I always think to myself, or I always thought to myself, what would I want to see as a juror in order to be able to find somebody guilty of this offense? So that's really that's really what you're just trying to do. You're trying to gather enough stuff so that um so that you can actually prove that your suspect is the one that that committed the crime. After everything's processed and collected, crime scene tapes removed, everyone leaves the scene. Uh this case was the first homicide I responded to at this new agency that I was at, and it was it was crazy to me how quickly they processed scenes, even homicides. I mean, that took maybe three or four hours to completely process it from the time I arrived to the time uh that we actually cleared the the scene and left and the and the the scene was released. So in that case, um the suspect had been identified by a bunch of the kids at the party. Uh it took a long time to arrest him, though. He had a whole army of people who protected him and let him stay with them to avoid the police uh finding him, catching him. He was also trying to get some of the witnesses, and so some of them had to be put in a up in a hotel uh in hotels throughout the city. And um it was also rumored that he was traveling in a pack and had a group of people that would that would uh like assault the police if he got pulled over. So he gets pulled over in his car or another car, and then once the officer gets out of the car, the there was allegedly going to be somebody pulling up and and launching an attack or an assault on the officer, shooting him or doing whatever they they were going to do. I don't know how we finally we ended up finding him or arresting him. Um I think he got he talked to a lawyer and the lawyer talked him into turning himself in, so it was a big it was a big thing. So he's currently in prison for the homicide and the assaults. Um both the other people who were shot survived, the kid on the bed downstairs and the one that was in the front yard with the chest wound. They both survived. And this whole thing was because of an argument that uh that the shooter got into with somebody at the party. If I remember right, it wasn't even the kid that was killed that he had been arguing with. So that's basically it. You you go in and you you process these scenes and you just want to maintain the integrity of the evidence. Um, and anybody who's who's done any research on like the OJ case, there were there were several things going on there that they had been doing, LAPD had been doing for quite some time. And um, you know, it's just defense attorneys are gonna find where where you are sloppy and where you are lacking in either training or processing or handling evidence. So, and there's you can have a lot of cross-contamination. And I think one of the one of the crime lab guys for LAPD had a vial of blood that they had gotten from somewhere and they were in the scene. I I don't remember exactly, it's been so long ago. Um, but you have to be really careful and and make sure that there's just just everything is done by the book so that it can't be uh it can't be challenged. So let's move on to today's questions. If you ever wonder what law enforcement is removing from homes or businesses when they serve a search warrant. So the boxes being removed from the buildings uh basically contain evidence. There the evidence has to be identified in the warrant, though. You can only take evidence that is listed on the warrant, and they can only the police can only search areas in which that evidence can be located, and they can only seize the evidence described in the warrant. So there is boilerplate language in most search warrants requesting authority to seize any contraband, uh, something that is illegal to possess, but they can't take something based on a hunch or a feeling that the item or items are are a product of criminal activity. Now, if you're searching, uh you go in and you're searching for for a weapon and you see something that's that's obviously um contraband, which is something that's illegal to possess, or or something that's that's that's probably been used in a crime. If it's if it fits an exception, you can you can seize it. And the exception there would be like plain view. Like if you're lawfully in there serving a warrant and you look over and you see a firearm when you're searching for something else, you can you can lawfully seize that because it's an exception. And they'll the lawyers will have to fight over that in court because when you do serve a search warrant, you have to you have to inventory everything and write down in detail what you're taking and where you got it from, and all that stuff has to be documented, and then you have to give a copy of that to the person uh who owns the property or who's the per the person that is sub subject to the search. So, do you think fingerprints are a good way to catch a criminal? So fingerprints are the most, for the most part, they're good evidence, as long as there's no reason for somebody's fingerprints to be on the item or in the location that they were found. So, and they have to be, you have to have a really good surface to get a fingerprint off of it. The the surfaces, there's a lot of surfaces that aren't capable of being dusted for fingerprints. And fingerprint dust is a very fine powder like graphite or baby powder. And if the surface is porous at all, the powder just fills it in and smears it everywhere. So you have to have a smooth surface. Um, the guy that wanted me to take the rock that was thrown through his window. He could never fingerprint like a rock. It wasn't a smooth rock, it was it was dimpled and and had a bunch of it had a rough surface, so you never could have got a fingerprint off of that. Um I was fingerprinting when I was a new crime scene investigator, I was fingerprinting the inside of a car, and I thought the area of the dashboard was smooth, and I put the dust on it, and it just smeared across the service surface and absorbed into the dashboard. So you have to be you have to have a really good surface. I did get a fingerprint once that was identified through the uh aphys, which is the automated fingerprint identification system, and I got it off of a car window, a stolen car that was recovered, and I got the fingerprint off of the window and sent it in, and um they were able to to use that print to get an identification of the person, but it was the owner's print. So it wasn't useful and it didn't assist with the stolen vehicle case at all. And this stuff used to get like when I'd go out at the department I was at, if you were a crime scene investigator, you were also an officer. So, but sometimes you would be assigned just to do crime scene investigation work. So when there was a burglary or stolen car or something like that. And at the end of the day, I would come back and just I had fingerprint dust everywhere, all over my face, my hands, my arms, my pants, my uniform. It just, it's such a fine powder that it uh it just gets on everything and it and it stays there. So DNA, what does DNA stand for? It stands for deoxyribonucleic acid, and that's basically it's um you you've probably seen the twisting ladder of molecules that make up a DNA strand. And there's just some interesting stuff about DNA that not everybody knows. Identical twins have identical DNA. So when you've identified somebody, you gotta make sure that they they don't have an identical twin. And DNA was first used by law enforcement in 1986, which kind of surprised me. Um, it was a double rape and murder case in the the United Kingdom where they used it to identify the suspect. So over the last two decades, uh the process of DNA analysis has had incredible technological advancements. Um DNA analysis techniques produce results that are quicker, more accurate, and more detailed than in years past. Um and and DNA from degraded evidence is more useful now, and it's also faster and cheaper now to process stuff for DNA. So they are working on on getting DNA to uh like something that they can test in the field. They're working on speeding up the process even more. And and I think the goal they're shooting for right now is two hours to be able to take a piece of evidence, get the DNA off of it, and and be able to identify whether or not it's it's listed in the CODIS or whether they have a use usable piece of of evidence. They should be able to determine that within two hours. Collection of DNA evidence is eager easier than fingerprinting. You can get samples from porous surfaces as well. Basically, uh a lot of it can be collected using distilled water on the on a Q-tip. Um, like you're looking for, well, you're not looking for it because you usually can't see it, but skin cells, sweat, saliva, um, and other bodily fluids. So on paper and some porous surfaces like cardboard, it's best to cut out the section of cardboard or paper and submit that to the lab rather than trying to swab it. Because the lab people, they know exactly what they need to do to try to collect the the DNA off of that. That's it for today's episode. Next week, uh, or the next episode, rather, I'm going to talk about informants. And until then, take care.