Crime lab

Crime Laboratories

A Crime Laboratory (often shorted to simply Crime Lab), is a scientific laboratory where scientists examine evidence from a criminal case. The term "Crime Lab" has become part of popular culture largely due to the Emmy Award- winning TV drama CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, and its two spinoffs, CSI: Miami and CSI: NY. All three of these shows showcase their city's crime lab in every episode. The 1970's television show Quincy also featured crime lab personnel and procedures. Several non-fiction television programs, such as Forensic Files, document the resolution of criminal cases based on the scientific analysis of the evidence.

Lab Personnel

A crime lab deals mostly in forensic science. A typical crime lab has two sets of personnel. The first is the field analysts, who have various job titles such as Forensic Evidence Technician, Crime Scene Investigator, or Scenes of Crime Officer (SOCO). These are the investigators that go to crime scenes and collect evidence and process the scene. The second type of personnel in a crime lab are the laboratory analysts, who have various job titles such as Forensic Technician, Forensic Scientist, or Criminalist. These are the people that run experiments on the evidence once it is brought to the lab. For example, they could determine if two samples of DNA are from the same source, or they could compare striations on a crime scene bullet to a bullet test-fired from a suspected source weapon.

Public and Private Crime Labs

In the United States, crime labs may be publicly or privately operated, although private laboratories typically do not respond to crime scenes to collect evidence. Public crime labs are organized at the city, county, state, or national level. A law enforcement agency that does not operate its own crime lab usually has free access to a higher level laboratory for analysis of their evidence.

Famous Crime Labs

Some famous crime labs are:

FBI Laboratory - under the jurisdiction of the FBI (located at FBI Headquarters; J. Edgar Hoover Building): Generally considered the premier Crime Lab in the country, it was rocked by scandals in the 1990s when irregularities were revealed by whistleblower Dr. Frederic Whitehurst and by revelations during the Ruby Ridge case
Las Vegas Crime Lab - under the jurisdiction of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department
Miami-Dade Crime Lab - under the jurisdiction of the Miami-Dade Police Department
New York City Crime Lab - under the jurisdiction of the New York City Police Department
Los Angeles Crime Lab - under the jurisdiction of the Los Angeles Police Department: It's integrity and lack of standards came under question during the O.J. Simpson murder trial
Forensic Science Training and Research Center - under the jurisdiction of the FBI (located at the FBI Academy; Quantico, Virginia)