ABSTRACT
The legal integrity of any case will always depend on how an investigation is conducted; how evidence is collected, protected, and preserved and how an evidentiary chain of custody assures that the evidence offered can withstand legal and judicial scrutiny. Standard investigative practice calls for the security professional to attentively protect the crime scene and preserve the evidence. This chapter presents a comprehensive analysis of methods and techniques employed by security investigators that insure the integrity of evidence and preserve the scene in a criminal or civil case. Security professionals are continually concerned with whether or not the chain of custody of the evidence has been distorted, broken, contaminated, abused, reformulated, recast, or changed in any significant way. Every sort of evidence should be catalogued and packaged to track its life from collection to courtroom presentation and usage.
