Nebraska on the CSI Effect

Glamorization has always been my biggest com­plaint about the pop­u­lar­iza­tion of foren­sics on TV. Not that peo­ple think evi­dence can be processed in a man­ner of min­utes, with a big flash­ing “MATCH” sign on the com­puter with a pic­ture of the sus­pect, their social secu­rity num­ber, and their cur­rent loca­tion grabbed from the GPS chip in their cell phone, or even that one per­son can lit­er­ally do EVERY test in the laboratory.

What gets me is that kids watch­ing these shows think every­one work­ing in a crime lab is “model pretty”, and they all get to wear badges and guns and go out and col­lect evi­dence, inter­view sus­pects, and act as psy­chi­a­trists to griev­ing fam­ily mem­bers. Up until the past few years, the crime lab has usu­ally been an after­thought in most police agen­cies, with the lab being placed in an old nasty base­ment, with leaky walls, asbestos falling from the ceil­ing tiles, and the ana­lysts only acknowl­edged by police brass when there was a screw-up, and some­one needed to take the blame.

They pre­tend to do on T.V. what Cammi Strong does for a living.

“I’ll be sit­ting there going okay that’s not how it works. That’s not how it really hap­pens,” said Cammi Strong, a D.N.A. analyst.

Strong never goes to the crime scene. Police send her their evidence.

The fol­low­ing in an inter­est­ing def­i­n­i­tion of the “CSI Effect”. I always thought it was the demand of juries to expect DNA, fin­ger­prints, and all other kinds of pos­si­ble foren­sic tests per­formed on each piece of evi­dence, or the jury goes “not guilty” because the state didn’t do every­thing they could to “prove” the defen­dant was guilty.

CSI, NCIS and Law & Order… the list of crime dra­mas on T.V. nowa­days goes on and on. On those shows, crimes hap­pen and get solved within the same hour. Law enforce­ment says the shows have tainted pub­lic per­cep­tion and have dubbed the sit­u­a­tion the “CSI effect.”

This is my favorite quote of the whole arti­cle. To sug­gest that TV shows are “teach­ing” crim­i­nals how to not get caught, then to go on to specif­i­cally tell crim­i­nals how they are still mess­ing up. Incredible!

Local law enforce­ment said shows are teach­ing crim­i­nals how to cover their tracks. But, they still man­age to slip up like leav­ing the gloves they wore to mask their fin­ger­prints behind at the crime scene.

Read the entire Nebraska.TV arti­cle here.