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Citizens' Academy: CSI edition
Editor's note: this is the fourth installment in a series of stories about the Nevada Police Depart-ment's Citizens' Police Academy.
By Rusty Murry
Nevada Daily Mail
It's been four weeks now since the Citizen's Police Academy began, and even though the information covered up to this point has been valuable, it seems like we finally got down to some of the nuts and bolts of police work during the May 4 session.
Nevada Police Detective Jens Barclay took on the topic of criminal investigation and handled it like the professional investigator he is. Barclay claims he can't tell a joke, so he began his presentation with a video spoof of the effects of various drugs on the behavior of the innocuous wood spider.
Did you know that if you expose a wood spider to THC, the active chemical in marijuana, that it makes a hammock instead of a web? Well, we didn't know it either, but we found the trumped up video of a relaxed-looking spider crawling around on a little hammock absolutely hilarious. The video set an easy tone for, class which covered personal safety, scams, crime scenes, evidence detection and collection and fingerprints.
Barclay touched on safety in the home as well as in the automobile, saying the best thing to do is to simply lock the doors even when you are home and in your car. Though car jackings are not a problem here, he said, if you are in a bigger city, they can be avoided by locking the doors and not stopping for other drivers who try to tell you something is wrong with your vehicle and try to get you to pull over.
After telling academy students how to avoid scams in which a worker approaches a homeowner and offers to do work on the roof or driveway or some other part of the house for a price that seems too good to be true, Barclay told the group about many other kinds of scams including those aimed at identity theft. His advice was to ask for a local business license or a business card, because the scam artists won't have either and if they can't produce them, they should not be hired regardless of price.
The electronic scams were a little more difficult because Internet criminals are constantly upgrading their tactics. When it comes to financial scams, e-mail scams and Internet predators, Barclay said the best protection is to never put personal information out there in cyber space, monitor your bank account diligently, and be aware of who your children are interacting with when they are online.
Finally, we got to learn what cops do when they actually investigate a crime. It is a complex subject and hard to boil down into a short class, but Barclay stuck with concrete examples we could identify with.
Large cities have a large van devoted to crime scene investigation, but everything Barclay has, as the primary investigator for the city, will fit into a box about the same size as the tackle box I use for bass fishing. He also said "you don't just wake up one day and decide to be a crime scene investigator" like it seems on television. It takes several years of being on the street and working a lot of crimes and learning the ropes, and then there are the specialty courses relating to various certifications and new technologies.
Barclay said a crime scene is anywhere a crime has been committed. A crime scene can actually be moving or scattered from place to place. He used the room we were in to illustrate how he would photograph a scene, beginning with a wide angle shot from the door, and progressing to the shots of individual pieces of things identified as evidence.
He informed the group of crime scene security and protocol, just what evidence is and the variety of ways it has to be identified, collected, documented, preserved and stored for later use in court. He said there are many misconceptions about what is really evidence. "A rock thrown through a window" is not evidence; footprints, fingerprints, blood, hair and things with DNA, now those items are evidence.
Some of the evidence Barclay collects is tested right there on the spot, other items are sent to a Missouri State Highway Patrol lab in Joplin or Springfield. For example, field test kits can be used to test some forms of drugs, but DNA samples have to be sent to a lab. Barclay has to pick and choose what DNA samples to send, because there is a large backlog of work and testing can cost up to $1,000 per sample.
The evidence kit that Barclay carries contains quite a bit of stuff, including the funky light you may have seen on television that shows body fluids, a test kit for revealing gunshot residue, a blood detection kit and a lot of fingerprint stuff. We've all seen way too much TV. And from what Barclay told us, and what I saw with my own eyes, it can be difficult to get a fingerprint that will be a reliable form of suspect identification.
Many factors come into play when it comes to fingerprints. "Fingerprints are difficult to obtain," Barclay said. He told us how something as simple as a person's hands being recently washed can prevent a print from showing up. If there is no oil on the skin, there's no print. A recently-washed hand has no oil. And even if there is sufficient oil present, the surface the print is on makes a difference, too. I volunteered and put what I thought was a good thumb print on the lid of a lock box. Barclay instructed and assisted Dana Boultinghouse in an effort to lift the print. Even with the help of an expert with many years of practice, all that came up was a smudge. Barclay attributed it to the surface of the box, which appeared to be pretty smooth but had a somewhat rough character to the finish. In another effort, Lorrie Divine and Barclay lifted what the detective said was a very good print from the body of a flashlight.
All this was pretty neat, hands on stuff and there was a lot of group interaction and several questions during the process. None of us were wearing cool sunglasses and driving a Hummer by the end of the night like Barclay jokingly promised we would, but we did get a great first hand look at some real police work. Barclay closed with a short explanation and discussion of the Computer Voice Stress Analysis system which is a bit like the old lie detector. It measures undetectable changes in the voice and Barclay said he has great confidence in the system, but, like the polygraph, it is not admissible in court.
This week we are going to learn about traffic enforcement, DWI and police patrol procedures. Read all about that class in the May 17 edition of the Nevada Daily Mail.