ABSTRACT
Action without purpose is folly and, simply put, becomes wasted e®ort. is is true in any endeavor. erefore it is imperative that before pursuing the actions an investigator conducts in the crime scene, the investigator must understand his or her mandate. Crime scene processing is a duty in every sense of the word. Crime scene processing is not something the technicians do because “they were told to,” but rather because they have a responsibility to do so. If the investigator fails to recognize this duty and its ultimate purpose, many of the procedures used at the scene might appear meaningless and therefore unnecessary. But each has an underlying purpose in seeking to recover both evidence and scene context. What follows in this chapter is a discussion of the conceptual and theoretical ideas behind crime scene processing. As we will discover, there is no single “right way” for crime scene technicians to conduct themselves at a scene, but there are certainly a number of wrong ways.
