Crime Scene Investigation
The first responsibility of an officer arriving at a crime scene is to address this immediate concern
What is protecting life and ensuring safety?
Fingerprints, weapons, clothing, and blood can fall under this general category.
Fingerprints, weapons, clothing, and blood can fall under this general category.
Investigators generally use this process to obtain information from victims and witnesses.
What is an interview?
This document provides the official written account of an officer's investigation.
What is an investigative report?
This constitutional amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures.
What is the Fourth Amendment?
This process prevents unauthorized people from entering or contaminating a crime scene.
What is securing the crime scene?
This record documents who collected, handled, transferred, stored, and examined evidence.
What is the chain of custody?
These questions encourage witnesses to explain what happened using their own words
What are open-ended questions?
Investigators develop these possible explanations from evidence and information collected during an investigation.
What are investigative hypotheses
Police generally need this judicial authorization to search a location when an exception does not apply.
What is a search warrant?
Investigators use photographs, notes, and sketches for this purpose.
What is documenting the crime scene?
Investigators should generally photograph evidence in this condition before collecting or moving it.
What is its original location and condition?
Separating witnesses helps prevent this problem with their individual accounts
What is witnesses influencing or contaminating each other’s statements?
Investigators should follow evidence instead of allowing personal assumptions to create this type of error.
What is investigative bias or tunnel vision?
Investigative reports should contain facts rather than unsupported versions of these.
What are opinions, assumptions, or conclusions?
This search pattern works well when investigators search a large open area in parallel lines.
What is the strip/line search method?
Evidence that tends to connect a particular person or object to a crime is known as this.
What is associative evidence?
An investigator should document these as accurately as possible because small details may later become important.
What are witness statements?
Investigators use this process to determine the sequence in which events probably occurred.
What is crime-scene reconstruction
This constitutional protection is associated with the right against compelled self-incrimination.
What is the Fifth Amendment?
This principle recognizes that contact between people, objects, and locations can result in evidence being transferred.
What is Locard’s Exchange Principle
Failure to properly package, label, preserve, or document evidence can create this major problem in court.
What is a challenge to the evidence’s integrity or admissibility?
Unlike an interview, this process generally involves questioning a person suspected of involvement in an offense.
What is an interrogation?
A strong investigation should attempt to establish both evidence supporting a suspect and evidence that could do this.
What is exclude or exonerate the suspect?
Evidence obtained through an unconstitutional search may potentially be kept out of court under this doctrine.
What is the exclusionary rule?