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. A well written crime scene report should be:
• Concise • The report must contain all of the required detail but be presented in as short and simple
form as practical • Accurate
• The facts are reported based on the physical evidence, results of processing activity, personal observations, and conferrals
• Objective • No conclusions are made in a crime scene report and no theories are presented. The
evidence speaks for itself once the analysis is concluded. (Note: when crime scene reconstruction is carried out it may result in conclusions but this should be reported separately from the crime scene investigation report even if it is completed by the same individual.)
• Complete • The facts as known, scene considerations, physical forensic evidence recovered and processing
activity must be presented in their entirety
During crime scene processing CSIs make many careful decisions about how the scene will be handled and how the evidence will be processed. It is critical that all of this information is conveyed in the report in order to prevent someone from inferring that something was either completely overlooked or not given proper consideration. The report must include processes that were met with negative results during processing as well as the ones that produce positive results; the fact of the matter is that they may be equally important. In the authors’ experience CSIs often fail to take credit for their efforts in the report when they
are met with negative results. For instance, if a CSI uses a forensic light source to search for biological stains at a crime scene but fails to locate any evidence it is not uncommon for the fact that the search was done to be left out of the report. This is unfortunate since the absence of biological stains may be just as important to finding out the truth about what occurred as if the stains were present. It also fails to allocate the credit deserved for a thorough job by the CSI team and can lead the person reviewing the report to wrongly conclude that the forensic light was not used when it should have been. Even though the fact that the forensic light was used may be in the field notes it should not be assumed that anyone will read through the notes before playing Monday morning quarterback and assuming that something was overlooked. Experience teaches that they usually won’t. In short, as the old saying goes, if it’s not in the report it wasn’t done (at least in the mind of the reader). The crime scene reports produced by a unit must also be consistent in presentation, style and
format from one CSI to the next. The audience of readers is limited and the same people will repeatedly need to read and understand the reports that are produced for the various cases that different members of the unit handle. This audience includes, detectives and criminal investigators, lab technicians, scientists, forensic experts, prosecutors and defense attorneys. They will all have experience in reading these types of reports and consequently will have expectations about what the report should contain and how the material should be presented. This is just the normal course of business. Consistency is expected and is required in order to remain efficient and prevent errors or miscommunication. Imagine an attorney presenting a written brief to the court and writing it freehand in their own personal style instead of in the format that is expected by the court. Regardless of the merits of the brief the court would not entertain the matter as it would not conform to what is normal business practice in the legal community. The same holds true for crime scene reports as they are also business records prepared to create a permanent record of events and communicate findings. Although the reports should be consistent within a unit they will undoubtedly vary in style from
agency to agency. This may be acceptable when it comes to style and format but we must at least strive for consistency in content throughout the CSI field.
