Crime sleuths cope with ‘CSI’ Effect

WASHINGTON - It takes less than a minute for Glory to locate the human remains hidden amid a roomful of journalists — but there are some things even Glory, an Australian shepherd dog that’s been searching through crime scenes for years, can’t do.

"The expectations for cadaver search dogs, for absolute perfection, have drastically gone up," said Jane Servais, Glory's owner and president of the Mid-Atlantic D.O.G.S., a canine search-and-rescue group.

Glory and her human counterparts in crime scene investigation are all having to cope with an age of heightened expectations, brought on by the gee-whiz science seen in TV shows such as “CSI.” During presentations here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, forensic experts noted that the surge of attention even had a prime-time name: the “CSI” Effect.

If only there were as much attention devoted to basic research in the field, they lamented.

Rise in popular interest
Not that the attention is all bad: More and more students are enrolling in crime-lab classes, said Max Houck, director of the Forensic Science Initiative at West Virginia University. At a news briefing Sunday, Houck noted that the forensic program had just four graduates in 1999. Today it's the largest major program on campus, with about 400 undergraduate students.

TEST YOUR ‘CSI’ IQ Forensic expert Max Houck uses this quiz question on students: You are given a glass containing a mixture of sand, salt and sawdust. How would you separate out those substances? (Answer on page 2)

But once those students start working in the field, they face pressures from the families of crime victims and others who expect test results to come as easily and infallibly as they do on television. The popularity of high-tech crime analysis has led law enforcement agencies to submit increasing numbers of samples for testing, resulting in a backlog of 200,000 to 300,000 DNA samples alone, Houck said.

The “CSI” Effect has affected other parts of the legal system as well.

"Prosecutors tend to fear the 'CSI' Effect on juries, because juries now have an unrealistic expectation of what the laboratory will do. They wonder why wasn't everything tested, when in fact not everything needs to be tested," Houck said. "Defense attorneys now worry about the 'CSI' Effect as well, because they think that the jurors come in and have this view of science as this juggernaut, this infallible objective method that is always right and spells doom for their client."

TV vs. reality
Houck said the TV plots have become so glib about the science that he can't watch “CSI” or other crime-investigation dramas anymore. "If I do, I just break out in hives," he joked.

Patricia McFeely, a forensic pathologist at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center, said she was particularly put off by the way the TV investigators always seem to be able to figure out exactly what happened when, right down to determining the time of death to the minute.

"They never have to go to the literature, as we do," she said.

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