ABSTRACT
In the end all of the effort expended by the CSI team boils down to several pages of reports and accompanying images. Most of the entities who will review the CSI’s work will never actually witness the work in progress, or visit the scene, or even have the opportunity to meet face to face with the CSI team. Instead they will read the reports and view the accompanying documentation and infer from it whether a proper job was done during the crime scene processing. Therefore it behooves the CSI to write a complete and concise report including not only all of the work that was done at the scene but also the decisions and considerations that were made during the scene processing. The main goal of crime scene processing is to maximize the collection of probative forensic evidence. This goal and all of the steps taken to reach it must be communicated to the reader of the crime scene report. Once the report is completed it should be subjected to administrative and possibly technical review procedures as described in Chapter 10 Ensuring.
