Hard Evidence

"The bones looked just like sticks and chunks of wood," says Baton Rouge crime tech Pammy Anderson. Nonetheless, Anderson's team found all but one of its scatter set while the other team found every bone plus an ulna (forearm) left by the previous class. It's a matter of utmost pride: The score of the two teams combined surpassed that of any previous session.

By Thursday night, the academy's fifth class is ready for some mindless entertainment, having doffed class uniforms (black boots, combat pants, and polo shirts emblazoned with a skull, gun and fingerprint) for jeans and sweats. By 9 p.m., most of the crew has settled, beer and pizza in hand, in front of the TV at one of the corporate apartments that serve as the school's upscale dorms. It's time for America's favorite prime-time drama, a show that some in the room love and some hate but all agree features a lot of "in your dreams" stuff: CSI. The show has also heightened the public's expectations of what CSIs can do and how fast they can do it.




For starters, several rush to point out, CSI's college-educated, city-roaming cast of characters would, in real life, belong to the ranks of don't-get-your-hands-dirty "lab rats" who work within the confines of state and regional crime laboratories. Some of these labs do, in fact, field mobile units to assist local police with the occasional scene investigation, "but most of the time, we're on our own," says Tim Horne, an investigator with the Orange County, North Carolina, sheriff's office. "We collect it, and 90 percent of the time, we process it ourselves." And in
a typical, medium-size law-enforcement agency such as Horne's, in-house processing means whatever the local investigators can pull off in the ad hoc evidence room.




As for the technology employed on CSI, this audience agrees that, for the most part, it's real, even if pricey, exaggerated and needlessly flashy. Hooting begins as they watch an audiovisual expert in the fictional Las Vegas crime lab zoom in for a close-up of a mole on the neck of an out-of-focus figure in a confiscated snuff film. As every investigator learns when dealing with security camera videos, you can't focus an already out-of-focus picture. (Digital sharpening can produce an image that looks more focused but at the cost of detail and accuracy.) Nor, investigators point out, can you get blood to fluoresce in broad daylight, something the fictional Warrick accomplishes after the next commercial break.




But the biggest beef this class has with Hollywood's glitzed-up version of their work is the speed with which the prime-time CSIs get their results. "They scan in a fingerprint and presto, up comes the name of a convicted felon," scoffs Houston crime technician Christopher Duncan. "I wish!"