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Crime Scene Assessment

One of the principal tasks of law enforcement is the assessment of crime scenes. Regardless of how a crime scene comes to the attention of law enforcement, and regardless of the number and quality of eye witnesses that may point police toward the perpetrators of the crime, a thorough and professional assessment of the crime scene is crucial for the investigation, apprehension, and eventual prosecution of the offender.

The Crime Scene

A crime scene is any location where a crime may have been committed. It can be a single location, multiple locations, the bottom of an ocean, several city blocks, inside the workings of a computer, or even somewhere in cyberspace. Suppose, for example, a person was kidnapped from a shopping mall (crime scene one), transported in a vehicle (crime scene two), sexually assaulted and murdered in an abandoned building (crime scene three), and taken to a field and dumped (crime scene four). Each scene would be considered separately, and each would offer the investigator the opportunity to gather evidence.

Often, a location is considered and treated as a crime scene when one of the goals is to determine whether a crime in fact occurred. For instance, for investigators who have the responsibility of investigating plane crashes, the crime scene could be at the bottom of an ocean, as was the case with TWA Flight 800, which crashed in the Atlantic Ocean in July 1996. It was subsequently determined that no crime had been committed.

The number of crimes committed with the use of computers continues to rise. Computers can be used to commit the crime, as by hacking into network systems. Computers can also be used to hold information about a crime, such as plans for having a person murdered. Crime scene investigators need to be aware of the proper methods of seizing computers in order to have the computer forensically examined later to gather the necessary evidence to build a criminal case. When child pornography is disseminated over the Internet, the crime scene involves not only the original location where the child was exploited, but also any downloaded images and any discs, and the sending and receiving computers, which may retain electronic images of the criminal event.

The Crime Scene Investigator

The crime scene investigator is typically a police officer with several years of law enforcement experience and special training in crime scene investigation. When trying to determine what has taken place at a crime scene, it is the crime scene investigator's responsibility to answer the traditional assessment questions: who, what, where, when, why, and how. The crime scene investigator has to approach every crime scene with an open mind as to what occurred, and must avoid coming to a premature conclusion. All the evidence of the case has to be evaluated. A crime scene investigator who enters a crime scene blinded by presuppositions will miss important evidence and may be misled about what actually took place.

There are many different avenues by which an investigator may be misled. For instance, it is not uncommon for offenders to stage crime scenes. Staging, in this sense, refers to the deliberate alteration of the crime scene, either to cover up the fact of the crime or to make it appear as if the crime occurred in some other fashion or was committed by a different sort of person, such as a burglar rather than an acquaintance. Less dramatically, the investigator may be misled by deliberate lies by perpetrators or witnesses, or by the honest misperceptions of witnesses.

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