ABSTRACT
Crime scene analysis is a relatively distinct concept in forensic science. In a nutshell, it involves evaluating the context of a scene and the physical evidence found there in an effort to identify what occurred and in what order it occurred. Note that we said “scene” and not “crime scene.” The scenes in question are generally evaluated to determine if they are areas where crimes occurred, but that decision is not always apparent until after analysis. Throughout the book, scene and crime scene are used interchangeably; both are inclusive for all of the situations that crime scene investigators face. For purposes of this text, one may also consider crime scene analysis and crime scene reconstruction as synonymous terms. The Association of Crime Scene Reconstruction (ACSR) defines reconstruction as “the use of scientific methods, physical evidence, deductive and inductive reasoning, and their interrelationships to gain explicit knowledge of the series of events that surround the commission of a crime.1In Chapter 3, we will introduce the process of Event Analysis. All three relate to the same idea-defining the actions and order of actions at a given incident using the objective data found in physical evidence.
