I don’t watch a lot of TV, but when I do, I watch a lot of shows featuring forensic science. You have only to check out old TV or radio shows to realize that this isn’t new: even Dragnet in the 1950s featured a crime lab that was using all kinds of forensic science to help the police. Yet we also know that forensics on current TV shows don’t work quite the same way they do in real life.
At the 2017 Creatures, Crimes and Creativity Conference Bernard Schaffer, author of Thief of All Light, talked about his work. He’s an active police officer, and told the group that to get DNA evidence processed for his police department often takes sixteen months! Obviously, a sixteen month wait wouldn’t work very well for a sixty minute TV show. And if they you can’t guarantee DNA evidence to provide something one way or the other, what are the police to do?
I’ve worked with lots of police officers investigating campus crimes through my work as a college administrator. And what seems to work for them is what has always worked: police officers and detectives running down leads, asking questions, and putting in the long hours that the job takes. The forensics can be the icing on the cake to seal a deal; but without the initial investigation — speaking to witnesses and victims, etc., — the police can’t really interpret what the forensics are telling them.
Even on the Forensic Files TV show where the forensics are the focus of the show, it is the doggedness of the police, the leads they pursue, and their asking out of the box questions that sets the stage for the forensics to identify the criminal or the criminal process. And sometimes they stumble on clues or solutions our of just plain luck.
In both my Stephanie Hart series and the Mitchell Street series, the police and other investigators use all the tools of law enforcement. They talk to witnesses, follow up leads using both electronic means and show leather, and put the puzzle pieces of a crime together. They use forensics, too, but not as the focus of the book, because that takes the focus off the characters.
As a writer, relying primarily on techniques that don’t change much makes sense. I used to be annoyed that the late Sue Grafton’s character Kinsey Millhone was “stuck” in the 1980s before the advent of cell phones. “What’s the point of that?” I wondered. But by keeping Millhone in a particular time, Grafton has helped her to be more timeless than she might be otherwise.
Sorry, Sue. I get it now.
