4 Insane Realities As A Real CSI Agent (You Don't See On TV)

In fact, by the time forensics gets to a murder scene, it's pretty remarkable if there's even a body there to examine. The cops don't want to deal with corpses. Well, nobody really wants to deal with corpses (if you get too excited about dead bodies they tend to look at you funny). But the police especially don't want the body around, so they usually call an ambulance to take the victim away before he inevitably shits his pants.

Then there's the actual collection of evidence. We don't just shine a black light around all willy-nilly and swab a computer keyboard or two. No, we collect everything in the room, if not everything in the house. And when said house looks like this, it can get downright tedious (not to mention smelly):

Shadwwulf/Wiki Commons
Consider yourself lucky for never having to ask, "Are mummified cats considered evidence?"

Oh, and speaking of black lights, I'm about to ruin every single detective show on TV for you right now. Ready? Here we go: Black lights don't detect blood. Well, they do, but not in the way TV depicts it. In college we had a session where my instructor took several fabrics and smeared various bodily fluids on them (forensics courses are ... interesting). Then she took us into a dark room and had us shine black lights on them, and that's when we discovered that blood absorbs UV light and appears as black splotches. So what's that bright, glowing fluid all the TV black lights are revealing? The answer, of course, is semen. Every single episode of CSI: Miami features David Caruso standing in a room absolutely drenched in man-batter.

Likewise, the average DNA test takes 24 to 72 hours -- and that's with a perfect sample and nothing else in the lab's queue. In college, I worked as an intern at a DNA lab, and the day they authorized my internship, they took a cheek swab so they could have my DNA on file in case of contamination (that, or clone me without my knowledge). Even with a professionally collected sample in a for-profit lab, I couldn't start work there for three days because that's how long it took to properly sequence my genetic leavings. And that can easily double when we collect a sample from anything that isn't a person, because then you've got to filter out all the cat hair and hobo pee to even get to a usable sample.

Digital Vision./Photodisc/Getty Images
"How can you tell it's pee from a hobo?"
"... You really don't want to know."

With that in mind, consider that even though Phoenix is a pretty safe place, it still has around 120 murders a year. And for each of those murders, there are wounds to be swabbed, DNA and fingerprints to be taken, and mounds of other evidence to be cataloged. That sounds totally doable, until you add in the other 6,000 or so violent crimes (rape, assault, arson, etc.). Even if you assume that each of those has a hilariously lowballed 10 pieces of evidence, that's still 170 pieces of evidence appearing in Phoenix's labs daily. There's no way all that's getting processed or, hell, even started in one day -- and tomorrow it starts all over again. It's so bad that thousands upon thousands of rape kits across the country have been tossed onto shelves, never to be processed. It's like the warehouse scene at the end of Raiders Of The Lost Ark, but way more depressing and full of semen.

Dario Lo Presti/iStock/Getty Images
They've got middlemen working on it right now. Middle. Men.

That's quickly becoming a theme for this article.

In Phoenix there are separate labs for fingerprints, DNA (as well as several independent labs for it), toxicology, ballistics, trace chemical (mass spectrometry), and trace physical (microscopes and such). Of those, the only ones that have any real crossover are the two trace labs, and they don't have the same people working in them. The morgue is even in a separate building that's only connected to the lab by a series of underground tunnels, presumably so it can be easily dynamited off when the zombie uprising hits.

As much as the cops might hate it at the time, it's far better for us to come up with independent results that might disagree with the investigating officer's theory. Don't believe me? Go ask one of the thousands of people the FBI recently found were wrongly convicted thanks to fucked-up forensic testimony.

Forensics is just never as cut-and-dried as Hollywood makes it out to be. To get an idea of what it's really like, imagine finding a puzzle piece on the sidewalk. Now, imagine someone demanding that, because you're holding that one, tiny piece, you need to tell them exactly what the entire puzzle looks like. Unless you have a catalog of every single puzzle ever made, you can't. Even if a tech is lucky enough to find that perfect fingerprint or DNA sample, it still means precisely squat unless we have that person's information in the system. If we do, then we might find him ... in a few months. But if he's never had his fingerprints taken, then we're totally screwed -- and, sadly, not in a "by the cute goth girl from NCIS" kind of way.

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More like the metaphorical Dexter kind of way.

Jennifer has a blog where she teaches people to sew (she's a little bit all over the place). Jason is an editor for Cracked. He sincerely hopes his Facebook page doesn't glow under a black light.

For more insider perspectives, check out 5 Things I Learned as a Cop (That Movies Won't Show You) and 6 Realities of Buying Drugs (While Wearing A Wire).

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