Crime has always plagued human existence since before laws were created. It’s a fact as immutable as the fact that a clown’s face will always be purposefully ugly rather than entertaining. In fact, pop culture in the 2000s has taken a liking to crime thrillers with shows like CSI, Law and Order, Castle, and Monk. And well, the thing that separates CSI from the other crime thrillers is that they actually show the lab personnel — these unsung heroes — hard at work. This, in turn, has moved many of the viewers to want to learn how to become a crime scene investigator themselves.
The shows put an emphasis on forensic science. The new Hawaii Five-O would later use the same emphasis in its show and quite frankly, it’s not as mundane as one would think. There’s a certain appeal in watching how tests are done in the lab in order to find the perp. And the cool bit is that a lot of the tech featured in these shows is actually real. We have machines that do chemical analysis, ballistics analysis, and an extensive database that contains vital information on every criminal. All these are real and they’re helping solve crimes on a regular basis.
1 High-Speed Ballistics Photography This technology makes use of high-speed cameras to capture bullet trajectory and both the entry and exit points of a bullet. It is also used to analyze how a bullet shatters glass in order to determine the bullet’s point A to point B path.