ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the reality of crime and crash scenes and how they must be carefully and accurately mapped and recorded since scene reconstructions ultimately may be presented in court. Regardless of whether crime rises or falls on a national scale-FBI and other statistics indicate that crime rates have decreased in recent years-there will always be ample crime scenes to investigate and record. Naturally, many cases connected to these scenes will head to court, which makes mapping and diagramming the crime scenes carefully so essential to reveal accurate details within their reconstruction. All of these considerations show why a crime scene investigator must walk the scene first and devise a strategy for what parts of it should be the focus of documentation and what evidence captured for further analysis, and how to best diagram it for posterity. Specifically, the drone has been successfully married to photogrammetry and scanning to help record huge crash scenes and selected crime scenes.
