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Science and Technology against Crime
| Article
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14436 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1988 |
2,416 Words |
| Author
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Peter Gwynne
Peter Gwynne is a free-lance science writer based in
Washington, D.C. |
Fighting crime inevitably involves lots of legwork. But today it also requires plenty of lab work. In fact, new technologies are increasingly moving out of academe and industry and into the police lab to help crime fighters track down evidence and, just as important, make the evidence hold up in court.
Because of the peculiar natures of criminal investigation, evidence, and juries, crime fighters' use of new technology is often restrained and delayed. New analytical techniques that apply to almost pure substances in the industrial or university lab cannot necessarily be applied to identify raw materials at a crime scene: bloodstains that may be old and caked with dirt and other detritus, fibers of material mixed in with a multitude of other materials, tiny slivers of shattered glass, and all the other results of a criminal act. Further, forensic scientists cannot always take full advantage of the very newest technology, because they have to convince courts and juries of the validity of their techniques; that is a difficult task if the method is so near the cutting edge of technical skill that the scientific community is not entirely convinced of its accuracy. And since, by the nature of the U.S. legal system, both sides in any case can bring in their own experts to view the evidence, it is important that new forensic techniques do not destroy the material to which they are applied.
Nevertheless, forensic science is increasingly gaining the benefits of cutting-edge research in biotechnology, lasers, computers, and a raft of analytical techniques. In the United States, the organization largely responsible for applying such methods to real-life crime fighting is the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which operates a major laboratory at its headquarters in Washington, D.C., and a forensic research and training center about one hour's drive away in Quantico, Virginia. Between them, the two laboratories aim to apply the best of emerging technology to the continual mission against crime, and to train forensic scientists and technicians from about 200 local and state crime labs to use such methods most effectively. In addition, the FBI provides lab services to law enforcement agencies that do not have an alternative source of these advanced technologies.
The laboratory division at FBI headquarters contains three sections, each with its own unique set of skills. The largest of these, the Laboratory Division, is devoted to scientific analysis. Its fundamental forensic methods are serology (the study of body fluids), toxicology (the study of poisons), materials analysis (which deals mainly with paints, plastics, and
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