On-scene chemical investigations

[antonroland]

Good morning all

I would like to know more about fingerprint investigations on scenes as it is currently done by all on here. We have, over the past few years, had a wonderful improvement of fingerprint lab equipment but my personal opinion is that an unhealthy bias towards "bag-'n-tag" has developed. As delicate as latent prints can be I feel that more focus should go into performing more advanced investigations on the scene.

How do all you folks do it? I understand that OS&H can play a major role in this but I would like to know more about how this happens in the rest of the world.

Thanks!

[Gerald Clough]

Again, for perspective on the U.S., the number of agencies able to routinely do anything very sophisticated on-scene is relatively small, quite a small percentage of agencies and a small portion geographically. It can be very patchy. Where most agencies are very small, there is rarely anyone working strictly as a scene tech or even anyone deeply trained and equipped. Given that, not unexpectedly, these agencies do not have anything very sophisticated available as a lab, either. They depend largely on such things as state labs and therefore have to remove objects. They may, of course, request on-scene help from the large organization for a major case. How major that must be depends, I'm sure, on where it is. And, of course, where a state lab is receiving work from so many agencies, they are hard pressed. Most local agencies will never send anything to a federal lab.

Using the 2,000 figures that I happen to have at hand, of 12,666 local police agencies in the U.S., 9,594 have fewer than 25 sworn officers. 5,875 have fewer than ten. 5,297 of them serve populations of less than 2,500 and have an average of four employees of all kinds and an average budget of 195,000USD. Only about 40 percent of those 5,297 local police agencies serving under 2,500 populations will expect to investigate a homicide in a year. For all that an agency serving a population over 25,000 is pretty much assured of at least one homicide in a year, only 58 percent of all U.S. local police departments are likely to have a homicide to investigate. The numbers for the 3,070 sheriff's offices are similar but harder to interpret, since they include the cities within their jurisdictions as their reported service area but mostly work only outside the incorporated cities.

Those numbers don't move the local budget authorities to fund much in the way of advanced forensics, and it can be very difficult to create organized cooperative efforts, although there is a good bit of informal cooperation where one or another agency has a needed resource. (Hard to agree on who's in charge and how to apportion funding. The cities, where the bulk of the taxing potential lies, feel like they end up carrying the load, and the counties figure their constituents who live inside the city have already paid their share. And the sheriff's often want to be in charge and, as elected officials, want the credit.) I haven't surveyed many other states, but in Texas as least, the state agency that provides lab services is, for the purpose of most crimes, in an assist-only role and works only as called in by the local agencies.

So, for the most part, it's still powder and glue, and, given the lack of scene techs for routine incidents, not on scene, except for immovables. With the small agency sizes, it's often a matter of individual officers and investigators applying their particular training, rather than a deliberate agency effort to maintain that capability.

[Neville]

DOESN'T IT DEPEND ON WHAT THE OFFENCE IS THAT IS BEING INVESTIGATED

[Gerald Clough]

DOESN'T IT DEPEND ON WHAT THE OFFENCE IS THAT IS BEING INVESTIGATED

I assume that's for me. If you mean to ask if the type of offense would determine if it was investigated by a local agency or a state or federal agency, I'd have to say that, in most places, almost everything will be handled by the local agency. There are some areas where that's not strictly true. One or another state many be set up so that reports are taken by a local agency, and state investigators will follow up on anything major. In that situation, the state detectives are likely assigned and officed locally but are part of a large, state organization and therefore can routinely call upon central forensic resources. But I think it's fair to say that in most places, the state agency would get involved only at the request of the local. It's difficult to generalize with any accuracy, given the fifty different structures in the U.S. I'll use my Texas as an example that I don't think is uncommon.

The local police departments and sheriffs respond to, take reports of, and investigate pretty much anything that happens. There are generally no offenses that are exclusively reserved for a state agency. As a local detective, I could, on the approval of my captain, request assistance from a state agency. I could, for instance, ask that a Texas Ranger be assigned to help. Rangers, being a unit of the Texas Department of Public Safety, can call directly upon their forensic people to come into the field and can, when inquiries need to be made outside the local area, call upon Rangers in other areas to help. I could call upon the forensic help myself, but the Ranger will get a more vigorous response. There are quite a number of other State investigative agencies in Texas, some peace officers, some not, with more or less specialized interests. An insurance case, a case involving medical practice, and an arson case would each likely cause me to involve different state agencies, each of them, in these particular cases, being peace officer agencies. In the case of arson, the State Fire Marshal would have their own specialized lab facilities. I might also involve the Texas Attorney General, directly or by going through the District Attorney, in a cybercrime or public integrity crime, since the OAG has special units for those cases, or the D.A. might request the OAG take on an unsolved major case or a case in which there could be a local conflict of interest. I might involve a federal agency in some things. For instance, some major weapons explosives crimes might call for getting BATF involved, largely because of federal statutes that cover the same offenses and because of their expertise. But federal agents have very limited powers in state criminal law, just as I have no authority to enforce federal criminal law. I can, however, use federal agency forensic labs, although I would expect a very long turn-around, unless that agency's agents were actively involved in the case. There are forensic fields that are just not addressed in the state lab, things such as soil, textiles, inks, and other materials. I can also call upon a handful of experts in universities. Texas has two university faculty forensic palynologists, as well as forensic anthropology labs. I would also call upon selected experts in other, larger local agencies, perhaps for cell phone forensics. But except in very unusual circumstances, the local agency has primary jurisdiction. That does not prevent a state agency from working any case that comes directly to them that falls withing their particular expertise and does not oblige them to involve the local agency. We are all Texas peace officers, empowered to enforce virtually all state criminal laws. And that includes the local district attorneys, whose offices are all peace officer agencies, even if some small offices do not maintain sworn investigators. I think I figured once that I could stand in most Texas cities and that more than 15 state and local police agencies would have actual working jurisdiction on that spot.

So, as a practical matter, it does depend somewhat on how major the offense. Maybe better to say that all these things go into it, the offense, how drastic it is, how much specialized work is needed, the capabilities of the local agency, and the attitude of the local agency head. The larger cities and counties can handle most anything themselves. A lot of smaller agencies really can't, but may try to anyway.

[Neville]

Hi Gerald
You blow me away, it seems so complicated. I think we here in NZ have it sooo goooood. We have one national police force which is not actually a police force as such as it has no real pretence of be a military type organisation, it is a government deptment.

The only reason we would bag and tag would be for serious crime ie homicide arson robbery etc. For a burg or car crime if we bag and tag, it is normally to save time at the scene or to treat with chemicals, but most would be powder and lift at the scene. The big problem with bag and tag is it creates more work and storage issues. In these lesser crimes I prefer to deal with it at the scene. The issue is timing, the longer you leave it untreated the more sensitive the developing process used needs to be. We tend to get to scenes within 24 hrs so powder is great.

If we get snowed-under out on the road the exhibits in the lab back up and it maybe days or weeks before we get back to deal with it. We deal with our own exhibits but if it needs more advanced chemical processing other than ninhydrin or superglue we forward it on to the local Fingerprint Section Lab.

However the original question is about On-scene chemical investigations I guess this is refering to chemical treatments, so I guess I have kind of answered that one, for chemical treatment we bag and tag.

[antonroland]

This is what I do not agree with, bagging and tagging.

Surely someone somewhere must understand that shoving an untreated exhibit into a plastic bag should cut down the odds by at least 50%?

[Gerald Clough]

Law enforcement situations like ours sound terribly complicated to anyone accustomed to a national force or a very few departments, France, for instance. In practice, it works out okay. Of all those agencies I counted as having jurisdiction, most of them restrict their operations to a specialized set of offenses or operate mainly in an assist role, so there's not much tendency to bump heads. The sheriff stays out of the city unless asked. The constables coordinate with the sheriff. The highway patrol sticks to traffic-related offenses. As with most things, there's good and bad. One of the good things is that a citizen usually has ready access to the governmental authority over the local agency. You can go down and talk to the mayor about the police department, and you can make failures to perform an election issue for him, since the police chief works for him. The sheriff stands for election in the county, and so is normally responsive (especially every fourth year - I worked for one who figured the best time to send all the speed radar units in for service was the four months prior to the election). It's hard to get the attention of, for instance, the head of a state agency, to complain. The local agency can readily adapt their efforts to local problems, without a tortuous process of layers of review. There's a bad side of local control, too. If the lesser guiding lights of a local government aren't responsive or right-minded, the policing effort can suffer. And a serious financial problem at the city level can devastate the police department, which can't happen when the local unit is part of a state agency. I recall that during the 1980's, which was a time in which tax roll-back referendums were popular in the U.S., some Texas cities simply did away with police departments and left it to the sheriff, who might not have been in any better shape but whose office couldn't be shut down. We also see a problem with state agencies having significant responsibility for law enforcement, as their efforts tend to concentrate in urban areas, making it hard for rural counties to get much attention in things like narcotics operations. The big arrest and seizure numbers that a drug agency lives by are in the cities.

Bag-n-Tag:

The storage issue is a real one. As was patrol's habit of bringing me all manner of sticks, stones, and oddments they thought had print potential. It wasn't just the storage. There was the whole process of getting property back to the owners after processing. For small agencies it's simply a matter of not having people who have both the time and knowledge to adequately process on-scene.