CRJ311 Week 1 assignment Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

CRJ311 Week 1 assignment - Essay Example As the technology becomes more sophisticated throughout the society, the public has developed higher expectation on forensic technology capabilities. Greater public knowledge on forensic science has led to increasing the demand for forensic evidence in several police investigations thus inflating the workload for crime laboratories (Schweitzer & Saks, 2007). To my opinion I believe that the CSI effect is a legitimate concern because it influence the perception of the public and the legal team on the type of investigations carried. In essence, several aspects of crime shows have been criticised to be unrealistic. For example, the show characters not only get involved in the process of crime scene investigation but they also engage in conducting raids, pursuit, arrest and interrogating of the suspects and solving cases. Not all these responsibilities are for the forensic scientist, but they fall under the docket of uniformed officers and detectives. Moreover, if crime scene investigators process a crime scene it will not be appropriate get involved in the examination and testing of the collected evidence from the scene, as it would compromise the impartiality of the scientific evidence gathered. In addition, real investigation of the fingerprints and DNA data is occasionally unobtainable, and if they are available, it takes several weeks to process. Whereas the television crime scene laboratories usually get and process them within few hours thus making the whole show unrealistic (Tyler, 2006). Several researchers in forensic science have always described the shows as â€Å"high-tech magic† because the results that they give are instantaneous and accurate unlike in the real investigation. A forensic scientist Mauriello Thomas stated that 40% of the scientific techniques depicted in the shows do not exist. Moreover, the use of unrealistic techniques in