[Clare~Bear]

When watching crime and forensics programmes, how close/ up to date are the technologies and methods used to those that actual forensic scientists/ pathologists use?

Obviously the shows on prime time on the BBC/ ITV like 'silent witness' with bigger budgets have advice from the police and scientists so they get the jist of it right. I know they're not documentaries but do they often make up technologies that haven't been invented yet?

And do you think there are other technologies/ methods that they're not allowed to show because it would give potential criminals ways on making it look like suicide or covering themselves? Although apart from in 'Whitechapel' where nobody gets caught that I can remember, the scientists and investigators always work out who it is in the end, so the shows jsut demonstrate how hard it is to get away with murder.

[animalnitrate]

In reality it can take a lot longer to find evidence or arrest someone than it does on television. I don't know about the BBC programmes but the American ones such as CSI really do overly glamourise most things.

There's no special database that can tell you the identity of a person based on a tiny bit of trace evidence, it takes a lot of preparation to construct a DNA profile. We don't march around crime scenes with no specialist clothing, high heels and hair flowing everywhere. Those who are actually CSI's do not work in the laboratories and vice versa. A lot of the time it is incredibly difficult to find the perpetrator of a crime, hence why there are so many cold cases. Analysis done tends to be in the form of chemical tests or chromatography rather than a some super machine that tells you all the answers in microseconds.

[Gofre]

When I was studying forensics, one of the lecturers hosted a weekly "cinema club" where she'd show a couple of the forensic crime dramas that aired during the week and point out the most glaring inaccuracies, because there's typically a hell of a lot of them. As said above, it most definitely not an instantaneous process, going in without overalls and the like would contaminate the crime scene, and nobody has the kind of knowledge base that the characters in CSI do. I don't tend to watch them anymore simply because I sit through them being pedantic, but unless things have changed they really do glamourise most elements of forensics past the point of recognition.