The Rhode Island State Crime Laboratory
By Mary Murphy
Providence Journal (RI)
February 19, 2007
The crime: A hit-and-run. The scene: A cramped arrangement of rooms cobbled together over two floors in two buildings on the campus of the University of Rhode Island — the Rhode Island State Crime Lab.
Karen Vallaro, left, and Amy Duhaime, criminalists, or specialists in the examination of physical evidence of crime, are studying evidence collected by the police. In hit-and-run crimes, fabric from the victim’s clothing will sometimes leave an impression on the vehicle. The crime lab’s scientists may be able to connect the vehicle and the victim using sophisticated instruments.
One of the primary functions of the crime lab, fingerprint analysis, is performed by criminalists using computers. First, they will access a regional database to try to find a match for fingerprints lifted at the scene of a crime. If that comes up empty, they access the FBI national database. But it isn’t the computer that makes the match. It is the analyst, the human being, who compares and contrasts the possibilities and makes the final decision on what is a match.
The director of the lab, Dennis C. Hilliard, says that the TV version of crime scene investigation is very different from the reality and that humans make the difference in catching criminals.
“Cops solve more crimes than the crime lab,” he says. “Our job is to verify or disprove them.” In fact, Hilliard and his staff rarely go to the scene of a crime to collect evidence. Rather, police departments have their own investigators who are taught at the crime lab school how to examine, collect and document evidence at a crime scene, which is then sent to the lab for analysis. A murder scene for instruction may be set up so that the student officers can learn to find clues, for example, in the pattern of a blood splatter.
The crime lab handles about 600 cases a year, but the scientists are called in to testify in only about 10 or 12 high-profile cases, usually involving murder.
It used to be that arson cases were the crimes they studied most often. Now it is crimes involving firearms.
Most of the evidence work involving guns is done with bullet and cartridge-case comparison. The database narrows the evidence, leaving possible matches to be studied by the criminalist.
Rhode Island’s criminalists, bent under the fluorescent lights of their functional working space, bear little resemblance to television crime scene investigators who collect evidence and solve the crime in the space of an hour. Instead, the real criminalists perform meticulous and time-consuming work based on science.