Criminalistics

Criminalistics is the largest and most diverse branch of forensic science. In fact, many people use the terms criminalistics and forensic science interchangeably. In California, the major forensic scientists organization is the California Association of Criminalists. It is so called because a California professor, Paul Kirk, a pioneer of forensic science in the United States, coined the term criminalistics to describe the scientific analysis of crime scene evidence. Outside of California, most scientists in this field call themselves “forensic scientists” and consider criminalistics and forensic science to be different.

Criminalistics can be defined as the application of scientific methods to the recognition, collection, identification, and comparison of physical evidence generated by illegal civil activity. It also involves the reconstruction of such activity by evaluation of the physical evidence and the crime scene. The majority of cases where such evidence is generated involve criminal activity.

Marijuana and Paraphernalia

Just as there is disagreement about the definition of criminalistics and its relationship to forensic science, there is also disagreement in what people include under the umbrella of criminalistics. If the preceding definition were all-inclusive, then even a corpse at a crime scene would be criminalistics evidence, but no one in the field includes post mortem autopsies as such. The earliest use of the term in the United States included only firearms and tool marks, fingerprints and other friction ridges, and questioned documents. More modern uses of the term include many more types of crime scene evidence.

The areas within criminalistics that will be included in this entry are those that are commonly used in the literature and that are commonly practiced within forensic science laboratories, even though most laboratories (outside California) do not call themselves “criminalistics laboratories.”