First off, for anyone who still thinks you can be a 'CSI' a-la any of the popular tv shows, it just doesn't work like that.

I don't watch any of the 'CSI' branded shows, though I use to occasionally watch the original. I do watch 'Bones', which is similar to any of those investigative dramas. That's what initially got me thinking about it.

The other factor was a story I read today about the bodies of 11 women that were found out in Arizona. They've identified 8, and linked them through drugs and prostitution, but have no suspects (or none that they'll publicly admit).

Anyway, the question is, if you were an investigator, would catching the guilty parties be rewarding, or would the work just remind you of how ugly people can be.

I think I'd get a great sense of satisfaction from catching up to these people who think they've gotten away with their crimes. But would that be enough to overcome the depressing fact that most of these crimes were committed by people who simply don't care about others' lives, and were done for stupid reasons?

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.
"In order to increase awareness of the homeless, security have been given binoculars."

Interesting questions.

I want to answer this, but I want time to think about exactly how to put it. Maybe I'll sort of summarize it here while I'm at work tonight then PM you the detailed version. Right now, the only things I can think of sort of go against the spirit of the rules of BAUT.

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I'm not evil.
An evil person would do the things I think up.

I suppose I could look it up. But what is a CSI?

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As above, so below

"crime scene investigator"

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.
"In order to increase awareness of the homeless, security have been given binoculars."

I think it would be rewarding to actually catch some bad people and know you are making a little difference in the world ...

If the "csi' shows or any other dramas for that matter were actually about real life , who would watch them ...Certinley not the millions that tune in every week to see Miami's finest investigators zipping around in hummers at break neck speed

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Stuff i have ...LX90 8in.sct with antares 80mm raci finder on a wedge std. field tripod ....lxd55 5in.achromat ota. with a etx60 finder on a celestron CG5 goto mount...And a bunch of eyepieces

Okay, I've given it some thought and I think I know how to say what I think about it.

For me, the satisfaction would have nothing to do with the capturing of the people, but in the solving of the puzzle. When I worked at the grocery store, I'd often comment that there was nothing to eat. Everything around me was work, not food. If I were a CSI, I think a similar level of detachment would be in place. Unless I actually saw the family of the victim, or tried to see myself in the position of the victim, it would just be "work". Likewise, the arrest of the guilty would be secondary to the solving of the puzzle.

I'd have to make a conscious decision to involve myself emotionally. I think. There have been times I've been surprised by how much something relatively minor has affected me.

As for the shows, I still watch the original, and New York, though it's made a few runs at the shark ramp. Miami was never anything more than a parody and became unwatchable several years ago. I also like NCIS, mainly for the depth of the characters.

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I'm not evil.
An evil person would do the things I think up.

This thread is full of new words. What's a "shark ramp"? I even googled it and didn't find anything that seemed useful.

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As above, so below

The original reference is "Jumping the Shark". It comes from the TV show "Happy Days" where the tough, biker-hood type that personified what it was to be cool was pushed into using water skis to jump over a pen full of sharks. It is considered the point of no return in the decline of that series. It's also become the term used to describe that one moment in any series when it became too stupid to watch.

The shark ramp is that device that facilitates the jump.

There is now a similar term for films. "Nuking the Fridge". It's a reference to the Last Indiana Jones movie.

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I'm not evil.
An evil person would do the things I think up.

That's the funny thing; when I was in school, it was just me and one or two others who were in the Law Enforcement program to be actual police officers; a handful were there for the first part of their BCJ requirement to go on to law school. The rest all wanted to be "forensic scientists!" . . . which is interesting, since none of them were taking any actual science classes.

They were all people who watched the original CSI and similar shows, and wanted to do that. Like there's any such job. Who cares about chain of evidence? Lets have someone process the scene, analyze the results, then run around nabbing the bad guys!

Not that there's not jobs in that line of work. Just that they're all separate jobs, and most require to work your way up from the street to the detective bureau, or to have a science degree and lab experience.


Good news! I hear rumors they're trying to push another Indy for a 2011 release.

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.
"In order to increase awareness of the homeless, security have been given binoculars."

That's one of the things I like about NCIS, even if they don't mention it, they still sign stuff off anytime anything changes hands. They also make it a point to mention the chain of custody from time to time.

Also, Abby, the Lone Lab Tech, is played by a woman that has a Masters in Forensics. She's actually capable of doing what she's pretending to do on the show.

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I'm not evil.
An evil person would do the things I think up.

I am so hooked on that show, although I only watch the re-runs because I have no clue when it's actually on.

I have wondered about that process for some time now. Of course it makes sense that in order to be a detective, you would have to go through the process but what about the criminal psychologists and the coroner, etc? Do they take the same steps as the detectives or is the forensic side of it civilian working for the force?

I believe the exact process varies, but I doubt a high percentage on the forensic side have ever worked the streets. I know here locally, we have a state crime lab and jobs are posted on the state's website from time to time. They require a ton of schooling and lab experience, and if accepted I'm sure you have to take a civil service test, but there's no police or law work experience requirement.

There are, as I understand it, privately owned forensic labs that get contracted out to as well. With the proper education and experience, anyone (who passes a background check) can get work there. But you won't be out at the scene making witty comments while you gather evidence, nor will you be running around interviewing witnesses or making arrests. There'd be too much opportunity to alter evidence and not enough outside confirmation if one person, or even one tight-knit team, did the entire investigation.

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.
"In order to increase awareness of the homeless, security have been given binoculars."

Okay, this might sound even more morbid, but the one I would fancy is being an air crash investigator. NatGeo have the series Air Crash Investigation, which is about real air accidents. Solving the puzzle, which can be a mixture of human, technical, procedural pieces sounds like fun and I obviously like planes. It's morbid for me to say that because of course ACI is about real crashes with real people dying in many cases.

Well there go all my hopes and dreams; I've spent my life taking notes from Bruce Willis, "Surfs up pal!"

It's pretty obvious that the fictional CSI type shows are just that; fictions. So unless you actually become an actor on those shows, you won't really be doing that sort of work IRL.

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.

Yeah, I always imagined that the TV shows' depiction of what it's like to work in forensics is a lot like how TV shows depict what it's like to do my job. At least in that case it's something almost, but not quite, entirely unlike the real thing.

Well, there are additional steps, of course, inasmuch as a criminal psychologist must get a PhD and a coroner (generally) must get an MD first. (Certainly a "medical examiner," as the term is on Crossing Jordan--another show that is essentially nothing like the real job--is a medical doctor.) It's an MD you're not going to use much on the living, of course, but those people are doctors. My understanding is that forensic medicine is a specialty choice that you would make in med school, but I could be wrong on that.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

I figured it probably wasn't a 'get your coroner's degree through the mail' situation.

It's an option, but it requires like, 20 box-tops AND paid postage. Easier to just get your MD.

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.
"In order to increase awareness of the homeless, security have been given binoculars."

Your mailman would probably balk at carrying your, um, practice tools. Even our UPS guy would be annoyed at such a heavy package.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

On a board I used to frequent, there was a poster who worked as a medical examiner. One of the things you quickly noticed about her, was her wickedly vicious sense of humor (think of the character House played by Hugh Laurie, only without the need to censor for prime time TV), which she admitted was a bit of a "safety mechanism" for the things that she had to deal with in her work.

Having known more than a few cops in my day, they also have a vicious sense of humor when dealing with such a situations. (One cop story that sticks out in my mind, is that of a rape victim who had her throat cut, and the cops immediately responding with OJ Simpson jokes when they saw the crime scene.)

This not to say that the folks are completely callous in their comments. They pay attention to the people around them, and censor themselves when people (or video cameras) who could be upset are around. They're also very curious about how things happened, and take a great deal of pride in tracking down the responsible parties. In the rape case I mentioned above, the victim not only survived, but refused to be taken away in the ambulance until she'd been allowed to write down the name of her attacker and give it to the police. The officer who was relating the story to me was in awe of the victim's stamina, and they immediately went after the attacker.

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We want our children to go to the planets. Burt Rutan 6/21/04
Tuckers! Automotive Oddities! Building my hot rod with the help of the intarwebs Those who would delay scientific progress for a little temporary prosperity shall have neither. MachineCast Save the planet, by leaving it! "To be second in space is to be second in everything," LBJ.

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.

I am given to understand that New York cops really approve of Law & Order.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Having known more than a few cops in my day, they also have a vicious sense of humor when dealing with such a situations.
One of the detectives that taught one of my classes showed a slide of a snow covered yard that had some disturbance, and quite a bit of blood. The teacher said something like "We love snow. It gives us a glimpse of exactly where people were. And this [points to blood stain] is what we call a snow angel." Most of the class was appalled. I think they were in the wrong major.

You have to have a sense of humor. It doesn't mean you don't care. It means you're keeping that stuff from creeping into the other aspects of your life.

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I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.
"In order to increase awareness of the homeless, security have been given binoculars."