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History of Forensic Science in Policing Research Paper

History of Forensic Science in Policing Research Paper

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The nascent development of institutional forensic science as we know it today, in the late nineteenth century, was a crucial component in the larger process of the professionalization of policing. In the twentieth century, forensic science transitioned from a location outside of police agencies, primarily in universities, and an auxiliary role assisting police investigators toward greater integration with, and in some cases even location in, police agencies. The location of forensic science in police agencies brought many benefits in terms of coordination and control of the crime scene and potentially in the development of “intelligence-led policing” but also brought costs in terms of their perceived impartiality and its links to “mainstream” scientific institutions. The capabilities of forensic science have developed enormously over the course of the twentieth century, but research suggests that it continues to be underused by police.

Introduction

Forensic science may reasonably be viewed as having played an important role in the professionalization of policing that began in the late nineteenth century (Jones 1994; Laybourn and Taylor 2011). While there are histories of forensic science (generally written by practitioners) and histories of forensic medicine, expert witnesses, and the professionalization of policing (generally written by historians), the intersection of these developments remains underexplored.

Forensic science is, of course, quite old and predates the development of professional police and, indeed, police altogether. The origins of forensic science and medicine have been traced as far back as the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Chinese, and Aztecs (Bell 2008). However, forensic science as an institution as we know it today, with dedicated laboratories, infrastructure, professional organizations, and so on, only began developing in the late nineteenth century. While this development began outside of police agencies, later some aspects of institutional forensic science were incubated within police agencies.

Institutional forensic science as it exists today generally traces its history to late nineteenth-century physicians who were interested in what was called at the time “legal medicine.” The Medico-Legal Institute was founded in Paris in 1868 (Watson 2011) and “during the half-century following 1870, stateor municipally-sponsored institutes of forensic medicine were established in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Budapest and many other principal cities of Europe” (Ambage and Clark 1994, p. 293). Late nineteenth-century pioneers included Alexandre Lacassagne in Lyon; Joseph Bell in Edinburgh (who has been identified as the Conan Doyle’s model for the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes); John Glaister, Sr. in Glasgow; Bernard Spilsbury in England; Hans Gross in Austria, who published what has been called “the first textbook on criminalistics” (Jones 1994) in 1893; and R.A. Reiss in Lausanne. The primary site of this activity was at universities, specifically medical schools, in France and Britain, or law schools, in the German-speaking countries. As police agencies professionalized and became increasingly interested in solving crimes, these physicians were called upon to assist with investigations. Forensic science, however, was external to the police; there was no question of locating forensic science within the police agencies themselves.

Some have suggested that it was what we might call the “identification disciplines” – photography, anthropometry, and fingerprinting – that occasioned the crossover of forensic science from medicine and the university to police agencies (Valier 1998; Roux and Robertson 2009; Margot 2011). These three techniques were all developed not for forensics, but for criminal record-keeping purposes: for linking offenders held in custody to their past criminal histories with greater accuracy without being thwarted by the use of aliases or the adoption of false identities. These technologies were adopted in divisions of police agencies known as “identification bureaus” and were manned by “identification clerks” generally drawn from the ranks of the police. One of these techniques, fingerprinting, happened to also lend itself to a forensic application: the linking of accidental prints (or “latent prints” or “marks”) left at crime scenes to specific suspects. Although some early research on fingerprints was performed by physicians and scientists, it seemed natural to use the identification clerks, who classified fingerprint patterns for record-keeping purposes, as “experts” to analyze latent prints for forensic purposes. Thus, police identification clerks began to share the title “forensic scientist” with physicians and chemists (Cole 2001). Fingerprinting became perhaps the earliest technique whose use was so routine that it could be delegated from physicians to “specially trained policemen as its use became widespread amongst police forces” (Crowther and White 1988).

The development of institutions fully devoted to forensic science, as opposed to treating forensic science as an aspect of, say, public health or pathology, took two general routes (Margot 2011). The first was the university. For example, in 1909, Reiss established the first stand-alone School of Forensic Science at Lausanne, associated with the faculties of both law and medicine (Margot 2011). In 1908, August Vollmer, the Police Chief of Berkeley, founded a Police School in association with the University of California which included forensic science among other topics intended to make policing more professional and generally “scientific” (Carte and Carte 1975). And, Calvin Goddard established the Scientific Detection Crime Laboratory at Northwestern University in 1930 (Tilstone et al. 2006).

The other route was outside the university, in institutions dedicated to criminal justice. Edmond Locard, a former student and assistant of Lacassagne, left the University of Lyon to found the Police Scientific Laboratory, the world’s first police laboratory, in Lyon in 1912 (Watson 2011). Significantly, the laboratory was controlled by the court, not the police (Margot 2011). Other early “criminalistics” or “police science” laboratories were attached to government chemical or toxicological laboratories, as in Sweden (Ambage and Clark 1994). In England, many police agencies used the services of private laboratories (Laybourn and Taylor 2011). However, most crime laboratories outside universities soon fell into the control of police agencies. The Federal Bureau of Investigation crime laboratory opened in 1932 (Walker 1977). “By 1930, almost every European capital and many other principal cities has its own medicolegal institute, while France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden and… Finland all had at least one ‘police science’ laboratory” (Ambage and Clark 1994, p. 293), as well as Egypt and Ceylon. The exception was England. The Metropolitan Police “rebuilt and reorganized” (Laybourn and Taylor 2011, p. 94) its old laboratory into a modern laboratory at Hendon in 1935, and the Home Office established the Forensic Science Service and opened its first laboratory in Nottingham in 1936 (Watson 2011). Neither of these was an institute of legal medicine, however – a proposal to house such an institute at the University of London failed, signaling the separation of forensic science from forensic medicine and the “apparently inexorable decline of English forensic medicine” (Ambage and Clark 1994, p. 307).

These two routes seemed to cause some tension between the development of forensic science outside and within police agencies (Margot 2011). Many forensic scientists located at universities seeking to develop, expand, or maintain stand-alone institutes dedicated to forensic science were undermined somewhat by the steady assumption of routine forensic work by police agencies (Crowther and White 1988). Thus, forensic laboratories today tend to be located in law enforcement agencies, although there are also national laboratories and laboratories located in universities, prosecuting authorities, or judiciaries, especially in Europe (Tilstone et al. 2006). By the post-World War II period, even some university-based forensic laboratories, such as the pioneer laboratory at the University of Glasgow, came to be staffed in large part by the police (Crowther and White 1988), and the police won control of the Police Scientific Laboratory in Lyon (Margot 2011). Some have suggested that the university-police partnership that seemed to be emerging after 1920 never really came to fruition. Instead, nearly all technical developments in forensic science have come from mainstream academic or industrial science, not from either the police laboratories or the university forensic science programs (Tilstone et al. 2006). The US National Research Council (2009) also recently noted forensic science’s “lack [of] strong ties to our research universities and national science assets.”

Although forensic science began to be used early in the twentieth century in isolated places and cases, it was only in the 1930s “that detective and scientific work became more truly uniform and modernised and increasingly subject to government guidelines and direction (Laybourn and Taylor 2011). Innovation in forensic science and technology and its integration into police work provided clear benefits in terms of solving crimes, one, but by no means the only, function of the police. However, there have been recurrent complaints that forensic science was underused by police investigators. Many forensic techniques were useful in linking known suspects of crime scenes, but until the development of searchable databases, they were of little help in generating suspects when none existed. The development of computerized, searchable databases, therefore, was a crucial development, perhaps even more important than the remarkable innovations in forensic technologies themselves.

As Peterson et al. note (2010), “there is little published empirical data identifying the types of evidence routinely collected, and the extent to which this evidence is submitted to and examined in forensic laboratories.” However, what research exists suggests that forensic science has been utilized far less than one might have imagined given its seemingly utility for investigating crimes. For example, Peterson et al. (1987) found relatively low uses of forensic science in a sample of criminal investigations in American cities. Ethnographers of detective work found police investigators far more focused on nonforensic activities like interviewing witnesses, informants, and suspects than on forensic science. Nonetheless, the utilization of forensic science appears to be increasing. Almost completely absent in Ericson’s 1981 ethnographic report, it appears somewhat more in more recent detective ethnographies (Innes 2003; Jackall 2005). Nonetheless, researchers have continued to find forensic evidence, including DNA evidence, grossly underused and poorly understood by police (Raymond et al. 2004; Pratt et al. 2006; Strom and Hickman 2010). Strom and Hickman assert that in addition to the better-known backlog of forensic evidence at crime laboratories – where samples are not processed because of insufficient resources – there is a less well-known backlog of evidence that is collected by the police but never submitted to the laboratory for analysis. Consistent with Pratt et al.’s findings, Strom and Hickman’s qualitative survey reported that the primary reason for underuse of DNA profiling is that it is conceived by police investigators as a tool for building evidence against a suspect identified by other means rather than as a means of generating a suspect by treating existing archives of genetic information as what have been called “DNA intelligence databases” (Walsh and Buckleton 2005). Peterson et al. (2010) likewise found forensic evidence to be submitted to laboratories at low rates. They concluded, “it is clear that criminal justice officials external to the laboratory screen much of the forensic evidence and have a major influence on evidence examination priorities and practices” (Peterson et al. 2010).

Whether police agencies’ historic preference for non-forensic methods is desirable is an interesting question. As forensic capabilities, capacity, and efficiency increase and costs decrease, important questions will arise about whether greater reliance on forensic science in the investigation will be preferable from the perspectives of security, social control, social justice, civil and human rights, and economic rationality. Such questions have hardly been explored in criminology (but see, e.g., Duster 2004).

The tendency to locate forensic laboratories in police agencies undoubtedly facilitated close coordination between forensic science and police investigators and enabled coordinated control of crime scenes. However, this coordination apparently came at a cost. Recently, the location of the bulk of forensic science infrastructure in police departments has emerged as a major point of criticism of forensic science (e.g., Giannelli 1997). The criticism is generally twofold: First, philosophers and sociologists of science have generally cited independence from institutional, and especially state, control as crucial to allowing scientists to operate as if their sole allegiance is to scientific truth. This is generally thought to require the location of scientists in institutions where such freedom is permitted and encouraged. Universities, with their notion of “academic freedom,” are the most common models, of course, but even industrial (especially the celebrated industrial research laboratories of the twentieth century, now largely an extinct species) and national laboratories have been conceived as bestowing varying degrees of such freedom and independence. If forensic science is to be considered a scientific endeavor (and this itself has been the subject of some debate), its overwhelming location within state institutions would seem to violate this requirement. Second, the telos of all forensic analysis is a report or testimony that a legal party (usually the state) can at least threaten to use (even if it rarely is actually used) in a criminal trial. Under an adversarial system of justice, the trial is seen as a contest between two sides; vigorous (though fair) pursuit of victory by each side is supposed to generate the best chance of reaching an outcome corresponding with justice. In such systems, the association, whether administrative, financial, or emotional, of forensic science institutions with one of those sides (the state) to the exclusion of the other (the suspect) seems irredeemably problematic. Even in inquisitorial systems of justice, the association of forensic science with the state seems at least as problematic, if not even more so.

For these reasons, the tendency for forensic science institutions to be located within state law enforcement agencies is generally cited as perhaps the leading deficiency of contemporary forensic science among those interested in the reform and improvement of forensic science today (e.g., National Research Council 2009). But the prospects for change seem daunting. The major points of resistance are probably political and resource driven; forensic science organizations are understandably skeptical that state governments would fund forensic science to even its current levels if its mission was construed as driven by science rather than public safety.

Removing forensic laboratories from police agencies would also entail some costs in terms of coordination, such as allowing forensic scientists to use the nature of the case to decide what items should be tested and how they should be tested. It is also argued that forensic evidence can only be understood in the context of the whole case (e.g., Margot 2011). Looking forward, it is argued that integration of forensic science into police agencies will facilitate the trend toward emerging “intelligence-led policing” (Ribaux et al. 2006; Margot 2011). Some scholars, however, argue that forensic science would improve with greater distance from police agencies. Forensic scientists would focus more on the “pure” results of their scientific analysis, and their interpretations of the evidence would be less tainted by contextual information about the case fed to them by investigators (Risinger et al. 2002; Dror and Charlton 2006; Krane et al. 2008). With these compelling principles at odds, the issue of whether the current arrangement of locating forensic science in police agencies is likely to be hotly debated in coming years. As this historical review shows, the current arrangement is not eternal: It is not as old as it may seem, and it is the product of specific contingent decisions and circumstances early in the history of interactions between newly professionalizing police forces and the nascent, hybrid field called “forensic science.”

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