Forensic Entry Level Jobs

Forensic Entry Level Jobs

Forensic science is a fast-growing industry and there are many opportunities for people with the right training and experience. Forensic science technicians work in crime laboratories, medical examiners offices and police departments. The job of a forensic technician or scientist can be very rewarding, but it requires extensive training, skill and knowledge.

A career in forensic science is not for everyone. It requires an understanding of biology, chemistry and physics as well as an interest in law enforcement and criminal justice procedures. If you are interested in becoming a forensic technician or scientist, you should first complete your education at the undergraduate level with a major in biology or chemistry. After you complete your undergraduate degree, you may then enroll in graduate school where you will study forensic sciences such as toxicology, fingerprinting or DNA analysis techniques.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that there were approximately 49,000 jobs available nationwide for forensic scientists during 2010 (www2). The average annual salary range was between $47,000-$83,000 per year depending on experience level and geographic location within any given state or region within America’s borders (www3).

Forensic Entry Level Jobs

Forensic science, also known as criminalistics,[1] is the application of science to criminal and civil laws, mainly—on the criminal side—during criminal investigation, as governed by the legal standards of admissible evidence and criminal procedure. Forensic science is a broad field that includes; DNA analysis, fingerprint analysis, blood stain pattern analysis, firearms examination and ballistics, tool mark analysis, serology, toxicology, hair and fiber analysis, entomology, questioned documents, anthropology, odontology, pathology, epidemiology, footwear and tire tread analysis, drug chemistry, paint and glass analysis, digital audio video and photo analysis.

Forensic scientists collect, preserve, and analyze scientific evidence during the course of an investigation. While some forensic scientists travel to the scene of the crime to collect the evidence themselves, others occupy a laboratory role, performing analysis on objects brought to them by other individuals.[2] Still others are involved in analysis of financial, banking, or other numerical data for use in financial crime investigation, and can be employed as consultants from private firms, academia, or as government employees.[3]

In addition to their laboratory role, forensic scientists testify as expert witnesses in both criminal and civil cases and can work for either the prosecution or the defense. While any field could technically be forensic, certain sections have developed over time to encompass the majority of forensically related cases.[4]

Contents
1 Etymology
2 History
2.1 Origins of forensic science and early methods
2.2 Development of forensic science
2.3 Toxicology
2.4 Ballistics
2.5 Anthropometry
2.6 Fingerprints
2.7 Uhlenhuth test
2.8 DNA
2.9 Maturation
2.10 Late 19th – early 20th century figures
2.11 20th century
2.12 21st century
3 Subdivisions
4 Questionable techniques
5 Litigation science
6 Demographics
7 Media impact
8 Controversies
9 Forensic science and humanitarian work
10 See also
11 References
12 Bibliography
13 External links
Etymology
The word forensic comes from the Latin term forēnsis, meaning “of or before the forum”.[5] The history of the term originates in Roman times, when a criminal charge meant presenting the case before a group of public individuals in the forum. Both the person accused of the crime and the accuser would give speeches based on their sides of the story. The case would be decided in favor of the individual with the best argument and delivery. This origin is the source of the two modern usages of the word forensic—as a form of legal evidence; and as a category of public presentation.

In modern use, the term forensics is often used in place of “forensic science.”

The word “science”, is derived from the Latin word for ‘knowledge’ and is today closely tied to the scientific method, a systematic way of acquiring knowledge. Taken together, forensic science means the use of the scientific methods and processes for crime solving.

History

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Origins of forensic science and early methods
Main article: Forensics in antiquity
The ancient world lacked standardized forensic practices, which enabled criminals to escape punishment. Criminal investigations and trials relied heavily on forced confessions and witness testimony. However, ancient sources do contain several accounts of techniques that foreshadow concepts in forensic science developed centuries later.[6]

The first written account of using medicine and entomology to solve criminal cases is attributed to the book of Xi Yuan Lu (translated as Washing Away of Wrongs[7][8]), written in China in 1248 by Song Ci (宋慈, 1186–1249), a director of justice, jail and supervision,[9] during the Song dynasty.

Song Ci introduced regulations concerning autopsy reports to court,[10] how to protect the evidence in the examining process, and explained why forensic workers must demonstrate impartiality to the public.[11] He devised methods for making antiseptic and for promoting the reappearance of hidden injuries to dead bodies and bones (using sunlight and vinegar under a red-oil umbrella);[12] for calculating the time of death (allowing for weather and insect activity);[13] described how to wash and examine the dead body to ascertain the reason for death.[14] At that time the book had described methods for distinguishing between suicide and faked suicide.[15]

In one of Song Ci’s accounts (Washing Away of Wrongs), the case of a person murdered with a sickle was solved by an investigator who instructed each suspect to bring his sickle to one location. (He realized it was a sickle by testing various blades on an animal carcass and comparing the wounds.) Flies, attracted by the smell of blood, eventually gathered on a single sickle. In light of this, the owner of that sickle confessed to the murder. The book also described how to distinguish between a drowning (water in the lungs) and strangulation (broken neck cartilage), and described evidence from examining corpses to determine if a death was caused by murder, suicide or accident.[16]

Methods from around the world involved saliva and examination of the mouth and tongue to determine innocence or guilt, as a precursor to the Polygraph test. In ancient India,[17] some suspects were made to fill their mouths with dried rice and spit it back out. Similarly, in ancient China, those accused of a crime would have rice powder placed in their mouths.[18] In ancient middle-eastern cultures, the accused were made to lick hot metal rods briefly. It is thought that these tests had some validity[citation needed] since a guilty person would produce less saliva and thus have a drier mouth;[19] the accused would be considered guilty if rice was sticking to their mouths in abundance or if their tongues were severely burned due to lack of shielding from saliva.[citation needed]

Development of forensic science

Ambroise Paré’s surgical work laid the groundwork for the development of forensic techniques in the following centuries.
In 16th-century Europe, medical practitioners in army and university settings began to gather information on the cause and manner of death. Ambroise Paré, a French army surgeon, systematically studied the effects of violent death on internal organs.[20][21] Two Italian surgeons, Fortunato Fidelis and Paolo Zacchia, laid the foundation of modern pathology by studying changes that occurred in the structure of the body as the result of disease.[22] In the late 18th century, writings on these topics began to appear. These included A Treatise on Forensic Medicine and Public Health by the French physician Francois Immanuele Fodéré[23] and The Complete System of Police Medicine by the German medical expert Johann Peter Frank.[24]

As the rational values of the Enlightenment era increasingly permeated society in the 18th century, criminal investigation became a more evidence-based, rational procedure − the use of torture to force confessions was curtailed, and belief in witchcraft and other powers of the occult largely ceased to influence the court’s decisions. Two examples of English forensic science in individual legal proceedings demonstrate the increasing use of logic and procedure in criminal investigations at the time. In 1784, in Lancaster, John Toms was tried and convicted for murdering Edward Culshaw with a pistol. When the dead body of Culshaw was examined, a pistol wad (crushed paper used to secure powder and balls in the muzzle) found in his head wound matched perfectly with a torn newspaper found in Toms’s pocket, leading to the conviction.[25]

This is an example and explanation of extractor/ejector marks on casings.
In Warwick 1816, a farm laborer was tried and convicted of the murder of a young maidservant. She had been drowned in a shallow pool and bore the marks of violent assault. The police found footprints and an impression from corduroy cloth with a sewn patch in the damp earth near the pool. There were also scattered grains of wheat and chaff. The breeches of a farm labourer who had been threshing wheat nearby were examined and corresponded exactly to the impression in the earth near the pool.[26]

An article appearing in Scientific American in 1885 describes the use of microscopy to distinguish between the blood of two persons in a criminal case in Chicago.[27]

Toxicology
A method for detecting arsenious oxide, simple arsenic, in corpses was devised in 1773 by the Swedish chemist, Carl Wilhelm Scheele.[28] His work was expanded upon, in 1806, by German chemist Valentin Ross, who learned to detect the poison in the walls of a victim’s stomach.[29]

Apparatus for the arsenic test, devised by James Marsh
James Marsh was the first to apply this new science to the art of forensics. He was called by the prosecution in a murder trial to give evidence as a chemist in 1832. The defendant, John Bodle, was accused of poisoning his grandfather with arsenic-laced coffee. Marsh performed the standard test by mixing a suspected sample with hydrogen sulfide and hydrochloric acid. While he was able to detect arsenic as yellow arsenic trisulfide, when it was shown to the jury it had deteriorated, allowing the suspect to be acquitted due to reasonable doubt.[30]

Annoyed by that, Marsh developed a much better test. He combined a sample containing arsenic with sulfuric acid and arsenic-free zinc, resulting in arsine gas. The gas was ignited, and it decomposed to pure metallic arsenic, which, when passed to a cold surface, would appear as a silvery-black deposit.[31] So sensitive was the test, known formally as the Marsh test, that it could detect as little as one-fiftieth of a milligram of arsenic. He first described this test in The Edinburgh Philosophical Journal in 1836.[32]

Ballistics
Main article: Forensic firearm examination
Henry Goddard at Scotland Yard pioneered the use of bullet comparison in 1835. He noticed a flaw in the bullet that killed the victim and was able to trace this back to the mold that was used in the manufacturing process.[33]

Entry/exit wounds based on the distance the firearm was discharged
Anthropometry

Frontispiece from Bertillon’s Identification anthropométrique (1893), demonstrating the measurements needed for his anthropometric identification system
The French police officer Alphonse Bertillon was the first to apply the anthropological technique of anthropometry to law enforcement, thereby creating an identification system based on physical measurements. Before that time, criminals could be identified only by name or photograph.[34][35] Dissatisfied with the ad hoc methods used to identify captured criminals in France in the 1870s, he began his work on developing a reliable system of anthropometrics for human classification.[36]

Bertillon created many other forensics techniques, including forensic document examination, the use of galvanoplastic compounds to preserve footprints, ballistics, and the dynamometer, used to determine the degree of force used in breaking and entering. Although his central methods were soon to be supplanted by fingerprinting, “his other contributions like the mug shot and the systematization of crime-scene photography remain in place to this day.”[35]

Fingerprints
Sir William Herschel was one of the first to advocate the use of fingerprinting in the identification of criminal suspects. While working for the Indian Civil Service, he began to use thumbprints on documents as a security measure to prevent the then-rampant repudiation of signatures in 1858.[37]

Fingerprints taken by William Herschel 1859/60
In 1877 at Hooghly (near Kolkata), Herschel instituted the use of fingerprints on contracts and deeds, and he registered government pensioners’ fingerprints to prevent the collection of money by relatives after a pensioner’s death.[38]

In 1880, Dr. Henry Faulds, a Scottish surgeon in a Tokyo hospital, published his first paper on the subject in the scientific journal Nature, discussing the usefulness of fingerprints for identification and proposing a method to record them with printing ink. He established their first classification and was also the first to identify fingerprints left on a vial.[39] Returning to the UK in 1886, he offered the concept to the Metropolitan Police in London, but it was dismissed at that time.[40]

Faulds wrote to Charles Darwin with a description of his method, but, too old and ill to work on it, Darwin gave the information to his cousin, Francis Galton, who was interested in anthropology. Having been thus inspired to study fingerprints for ten years, Galton published a detailed statistical model of fingerprint analysis and identification and encouraged its use in forensic science in his book Finger Prints. He had calculated that the chance of a “false positive” (two different individuals having the same fingerprints) was about 1 in 64 billion.[41]

Women clerical employees of the LA Police Department getting fingerprinted and photographed in 1928
Juan Vucetich, an Argentine chief police officer, created the first method of recording the fingerprints of individuals on file. In 1892, after studying Galton’s pattern types, Vucetich set up the world’s first fingerprint bureau. In that same year, Francisca Rojas of Necochea was found in a house with neck injuries whilst her two sons were found dead with their throats cut. Rojas accused a neighbour, but despite brutal interrogation, this neighbour would not confess to the crimes. Inspector Alvarez, a colleague of Vucetich, went to the scene and found a bloody thumb mark on a door. When it was compared with Rojas’ prints, it was found to be identical with her right thumb. She then confessed to the murder of her sons.

A Fingerprint Bureau was established in Calcutta (Kolkata), India, in 1897, after the Council of the Governor General approved a committee report that fingerprints should be used for the classification of criminal records. Working in the Calcutta Anthropometric Bureau, before it became the Fingerprint Bureau, were Azizul Haque and Hem Chandra Bose. Haque and Bose were Indian fingerprint experts who have been credited with the primary development of a fingerprint classification system eventually named after their supervisor, Sir Edward Richard Henry.[42][43] The Henry Classification System, co-devised by Haque and Bose, was accepted in England and Wales when the first United Kingdom Fingerprint Bureau was founded in Scotland Yard, the Metropolitan Police headquarters, London, in 1901. Sir Edward Richard Henry subsequently achieved improvements in dactyloscopy.[citation needed]

In the United States, Dr. Henry P. DeForrest used fingerprinting in the New York Civil Service in 1902, and by December 1905, New York City Police Department Deputy Commissioner Joseph A. Faurot, an expert in the Bertillon system and a fingerprint advocate at Police Headquarters, introduced the fingerprinting of criminals to the United States.[44]

Uhlenhuth test
The Uhlenhuth test, or the antigen–antibody precipitin test for species, was invented by Paul Uhlenhuth in 1901 and could distinguish human blood from animal blood, based on the discovery that the blood of different species had one or more characteristic proteins. The test represented a major breakthrough and came to have tremendous importance in forensic science.[45] The test was further refined for forensic use by the Swiss chemist Maurice Müller in the 1960s.[46]

DNA
Forensic DNA analysis was first used in 1984. It was developed by Sir Alec Jeffreys, who realized that variation in the genetic sequence could be used to identify individuals and to tell individuals apart from one another. The first application of DNA profiles was used by Jefferys in a double murder mystery in the small English town of Narborough, Leicestershire, in 1985. A 15-year-old school girl by the name of Lynda Mann was raped and murdered in Carlton Hayes psychiatric hospital. The police did not find a suspect but were able to obtain a semen sample.

In 1986, Dawn Ashworth, 15 years old, was also raped and strangled in the nearby village of Enderby. Forensic evidence showed that both killers had the same blood type. Richard Buckland became the suspect because he worked at Carlton Hayes psychiatric hospital, had been spotted near Dawn Ashworth’s murder scene and knew unreleased details about the body. He later confessed to Dawn’s murder but not Lynda’s. Jefferys was brought into the case to analyze the semen samples. He concluded that there was no match between the samples and Buckland, who became the first person to be exonerated using DNA. Jefferys confirmed that the DNA profiles were identical for the two murder semen samples. To find the perpetrator, DNA samples from the entire male population, more than 4,000 aged from 17 to 34, of the town were collected. They all were compared to semen samples from the crime. A friend of Colin Pitchfork was heard saying that he had given his sample to the police claiming to be Colin. Colin Pitchfork was arrested in 1987 and it was found that his DNA profile matched the semen samples from the murder.

Because of this case, DNA databases were developed. There is the national (FBI) and international databases as well as the European countries (ENFSI : European Network of Forensic Science Institutes). These searchable databases are used to match crime scene DNA profiles to those already in a database.[47]

Maturation
Cartoon of a man holding a bloody knife looking contemptuously at a display of half-a-dozen supposed and dissimilar likenesses
Police brought to bear the latest techniques of forensic science in their attempts to identify and capture the serial killer Jack the Ripper.
By the turn of the 20th century, the science of forensics had become largely established in the sphere of criminal investigation. Scientific and surgical investigation was widely employed by the Metropolitan Police during their pursuit of the mysterious Jack the Ripper, who had killed a number of women in the 1880s. This case is a watershed in the application of forensic science. Large teams of policemen conducted house-to-house inquiries throughout Whitechapel. Forensic material was collected and examined. Suspects were identified, traced and either examined more closely or eliminated from the inquiry. Police work follows the same pattern today.[48] Over 2000 people were interviewed, “upwards of 300” people were investigated, and 80 people were detained.[49]

The investigation was initially conducted by the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), headed by Detective Inspector Edmund Reid. Later, Detective Inspectors Frederick Abberline, Henry Moore, and Walter Andrews were sent from Central Office at Scotland Yard to assist. Initially, butchers, surgeons and physicians were suspected because of the manner of the mutilations. The alibis of local butchers and slaughterers were investigated, with the result that they were eliminated from the inquiry.[50] Some contemporary figures thought the pattern of the murders indicated that the culprit was a butcher or cattle drover on one of the cattle boats that plied between London and mainland Europe. Whitechapel was close to the London Docks,[51] and usually such boats docked on Thursday or Friday and departed on Saturday or Sunday.[52] The cattle boats were examined, but the dates of the murders did not coincide with a single boat’s movements, and the transfer of a crewman between boats was also ruled out.[53]

At the end of October, Robert Anderson asked police surgeon Thomas Bond to give his opinion on the extent of the murderer’s surgical skill and knowledge.[54] The opinion offered by Bond on the character of the “Whitechapel murderer” is the earliest surviving offender profile.[55] Bond’s assessment was based on his own examination of the most extensively mutilated victim and the post mortem notes from the four previous canonical murders.[56] In his opinion the killer must have been a man of solitary habits, subject to “periodical attacks of homicidal and erotic mania”, with the character of the mutilations possibly indicating “satyriasis”.[56] Bond also stated that “the homicidal impulse may have developed from a revengeful or brooding condition of the mind, or that religious mania may have been the original disease but I do not think either hypothesis is likely”.[56]

The popular fictional character Sherlock Holmes was in many ways ahead of his time in his use of forensic analysis.
Handbook for Coroners, police officials, military policemen was written by the Austrian criminal jurist Hans Gross in 1893, and is generally acknowledged as the birth of the field of criminalistics. The work combined in one system fields of knowledge that had not been previously integrated, such as psychology and physical science, and which could be successfully used against crime. Gross adapted some fields to the needs of criminal investigation, such as crime scene photography. He went on to found the Institute of Criminalistics in 1912, as part of the University of Graz’ Law School. This Institute was followed by many similar institutes all over the world.[57]

In 1909, Archibald Reiss founded the Institut de police scientifique of the University of Lausanne (UNIL), the first school of forensic science in the world. Dr. Edmond Locard, became known as the “Sherlock Holmes of France”. He formulated the basic principle of forensic science: “Every contact leaves a trace”, which became known as Locard’s exchange principle. In 1910, he founded what may have been the first criminal laboratory in the world, after persuading the Police Department of Lyon (France) to give him two attic rooms and two assistants.[58]

Symbolic of the newfound prestige of forensics and the use of reasoning in detective work was the popularity of the fictional character Sherlock Holmes, written by Arthur Conan Doyle in the late 19th century. He remains a great inspiration for forensic science, especially for the way his acute study of a crime scene yielded small clues as to the precise sequence of events. He made great use of trace evidence such as shoe and tire impressions, as well as fingerprints, ballistics and handwriting analysis, now known as questioned document examination.[59] Such evidence is used to test theories conceived by the police, for example, or by the investigator himself.[60] All of the techniques advocated by Holmes later became reality, but were generally in their infancy at the time Conan Doyle was writing. In many of his reported cases, Holmes frequently complains of the way the crime scene has been contaminated by others, especially by the police, emphasising the critical importance of maintaining its integrity, a now well-known feature of crime scene examination. He used analytical chemistry for blood residue analysis as well as toxicology examination and determination for poisons. He used ballistics by measuring bullet calibres and matching them with a suspected murder weapon.[61]

Although this is not necessarily considered to be one of the highest paying careers out there today

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