It’s another Thursday night. It’s late. There’s a gunshot, a growing pool of blood, screams, then flashing lights. There’s a killer on the loose and there’s only one question: “who are you?” The detectives on “CSI” never let us down, but Hollywood doesn’t get it right all the time.
Since the show first aired in 2000, its tricky twists and shocking endings have been keeping its #1 spot on CBS. Though we like to think it works just like the show in real life, it doesn’t always. On the show, when someone gets killed, the crime scene investigators (CSIs) gather evidence (because there is always a boatload of it), and even though numerous curveballs may be thrown, they always seem to figure it out. In real life, the process is much different, and [mri1] we don’t really see all that goes on to solve a case on the show.
Forensic analyst Gary Hauptmann ‘87 said, “It is different. They do things [on the show] so quickly that they have results within a couple of hours. Some of it is very farfetched.” Much of the technology is also not like reality. “When they run a person’s fingerprints in a database, their picture will pop up in a matter of minutes,” he said. “Some of the things we can’t even do.”
When a scene first becomes a crime scene, it must be secured and documented. CSIs then gather up the evidence, send it in to the lab and it is analyzed by a series of different scientists. “The evidence may pass through many different people before they are fully finished with it. On the show, many of the CSIs themselves run different tests, interrogate the suspects, and process evidence. It’s not like that,” said Hauptmann. “They [investigators] need to be different than a police officer who is trying to persuade a suspect to get a confession out of them. We are just looking for results.”
Though the show does stretch the job a little to make the CSIs seem like super investigators, they do display some truth of the real life solving of crimes. “Fingerprints are the most popular to solving a crime [like the show],” says Hauptmann, “That’s the first thing they do on most scenes.”
Many people may also ask: aren’t there other crimes to investigate besides murder? Hauptmann says, “We do get a lot of violent crimes like murder, assault, and burglaries. We go to a lot of burglaries because they can escalate into something bigger like murder.”
So even though the show has some accurate aspects of the process, Hauptmann states that Hollywood “definitely needs to brush up on its forensics.”
Taylor Schafer can be reached for comment at [email protected]