A few years ago, most of the investigative portions of our criminal justice system were a mystery to all but the select few who studied in the field of criminology. However, with the debut of the hit TV drama CSI, that changed. Suddenly people everywhere knew how to lift fingerprints with superglue and that crime solving takes a couple of days at most.

Unfortunately, this is relatively far from the truth. The kind of lab that is shown in CSI is not accessible to most of the country's police forces. Several of these forces do not have detectives let alone crime scene investigators. Most of the police forces in the US consist of less than 10 people and some of those have no more than 1 or 2 members. With a force this small, there is not going to be a special lab for them to analyze the evidence found at a crime scene.

On top of the fact that labs and crime scene teams do not exist throughout the country, there is the problem of too much so called knowledge in the hands of the public. On TV, a crime scene technician lifts a full or partial finger print from a window, AFIS pops out a match, and they convict a killer with it. But in real life, most people don't leave full finger prints and the partials they leave are often smudged. In reality, AFIS gives several possible matches and a person does the rest of the work with a magnifying glass and a lot of time.

The point is that all of these investigations take time and manpower than most of the US police forces do not have to spare. This is one of the reasons why people are not arrested right after a crime takes place. There are so many steps to take and these processes take time.

So the next time you are watching CSI, do not believe everything you see and hear. While most of the things you see are based in reality, everything they do is part of a script. If you want to know how things really work, take a class; you'll learn more.

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