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Old 13-July-2009, 11:48 PM
Delvo Delvo is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Taeolas View Post
If you want to know what real detectives and CSI's do, I suspect you'll want to check out some of the shows on A&E, CrimeTV, Discovery, etc... I don't know how really factual they are, but shows like "First 48" and similar are a better view of what really happens then the Crime of the Week Drama's on the main networks.
The ones that focus on the police detectives, like "Law & Order", are generally closer to reality of forensic science than the ones that focus on the scientists, like "Bones". (And it's not just because TV/movie writers don't understand scientists or other scientific people's personalities.)

There's a general thing called "character consolidation" that happens due to time constraints in the video medium. The basic idea is to take things that were done or said by multiple people and combine them so that you show one person doing or saying both/all of them. In forensic science, that means showing the main characters doing a variety of types of work which would really be done by narrower specialists. With specialization, each case would have more people involved in it, and each person involved would have a smaller piece of it and work on the equivalent piece of a larger number of separate cases, than is shown on TV. That's one reason why I didn't go for this profession. I love all kinds of science and would love putting together the pieces from various disciplines, but in real life I'd just be the guy who gets stuck identifying species of algae all day every day.

And in "Law & Order", you do see more of that specialization. They don't get all of their evidence interpretation from the same few people. When they need ballistic info, they go to the ballistics guest actor, who only has that one scene in that episode and won't be seen again for the next few episodes. When they need drug info or fire-accelerant info, they go to the guest actor in charge of blood tests or fire science, who only has that one scene in that episode and won't be seen again for the next few episodes. You don't see them getting comments on what kind of weapon struck a victim's bone at what velocity from the same person who also told them about the importance of the types of pollen in the victim's car's air filter.
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