Criminology and Forensic Investigation BSc (Hons)

Dr Kat Brown: The University of Portsmouth has unique, long-standing relationships with many local and national agencies.

We are here today at Southwick Park, which is the Defence School of Policing and Guarding. We're able to have these partnerships through our Forensic Innovation Centre and that allows us to build on their expertise as well as their facilities. 

The facility that we have here is particularly useful for complex and serious crimes around body recovery, taphonomy and entomology. We can use our SIM bodies in these situations to accurately mimic crimes and this means that our students can get really involved in the science, but also think critically about why they're doing what they're doing and what the bigger context and the bigger picture is.

Dr Helen McGonigal: As well as the indoor teaching facilities here, we also have this wonderful outdoor space. We're developing a unique aquatic decomposition facility here which allows us to explore the decomposition of insect carcases and associated evidence, for recreating death scenes. 

For our postgraduate researchers and also for our undergraduates, it gives them a valuable insight into some of the work that they could be doing after graduation.

We also have training opportunities here for the military, policing and mass fatality incident colleagues for them to be able to use cutting edge research as part of their work. 

Dr Katie Jetten: Our undergraduate degree programme, criminology and forensic studies, enables students to get practical experience alongside their classroom based studies. Some of the things we might get students to do are work in crime scene investigation simulation suites in a wide range of environments, but also with our extensive research capabilities in our research facility, which we call The Stables. The purpose of our stables is to facilitate academic research and also student research projects. 

Some of the spaces we might have our forensic ecology laboratory spaces. We also have a dedicated fingerprint visualisation room. We have an imaging studio with a wide range of techniques and we also have biological and chemical spaces in order to do work such as DNA work.

Dr Helen Earwaker: Our students have a really broad range of interests that sit right across the spectrum of the criminal justice system. I'm incredibly proud of the work that our students do as part of the course and the programme. The research that they undertake has the potential for huge impact, for practice and for those partner organisations that we work with.

This is really enhanced through the use of the facilities that we have here at the University of Portsmouth.

Simona Ciobotaru: Studying a degree here at the University of Portsmouth in our School of Criminology and Criminal Justice will open you up to a wide variety of career options.

Alexandra Hemingway: It's not always really obvious exactly what kind of job you might want to do. A lot of students do need some help or inspiration, and a lot of that comes from directly inside their course.

If they're studying forensics, they've got really good simulations where they're doing practical examples of working with a scene of crime and stuff where they're going outdoors and really taking the science outside.

Laura Haggar: We have some students who might go into the prison service. We might have students who are interested in economic crime.

Simona Ciobotaru: A lot of students can go either into cyber security, NGOs and charities. They can work for the police.

Dr Richard John: One of the great attractive measures of policing today is actually you could join with this degree as a detective or an investigator.

Becky Milne: We have a big partnership with Hampshire Police, but also police right across the country and across the globe.

Dr Craig Collie: We tend to recommend that students do a placement or some work experience so they can put some of those skills to use.

Alexandra Hemingway: For example, working with Hampshire Constabulary as well as with charities or victim support. Another option is study abroad. You could go and do potentially a semester or a year in another university and you could also pick a work placement abroad. And there have also been opportunities to work right here in the university.

Michela Scalpello: Students can move into other areas in terms of analysis, data or government.

Dr Richard John: The sky really is your limit. The university of Portsmouth gives you the skills, it gives you the confidence and it gives you that academic ability to negotiate complex and difficult issues.

Dr Craig Collie: Learning how people think and behave and understanding how you yourself react to those things work into how those jobs would work. We've just got a wonderful team who are very experienced. Our team is one of the biggest criminology provisions in the country. You can nurture that interest here with us at Portsmouth.

Hello and thanks for watching this Life Solved short.

I'm Robyn Montague, and in these videos we get to meet the University of Portsmouth researchers and their colleagues sharing their work in the latest series of the Life Solved podcast.

This is work that's changing our world for the better in all sorts of ways.

We've all watched CSI thrillers on TV and in the cinema. Screens are full of actors dressed in overalls, finding the tiniest smudge of DNA in the corner of a crime scene and getting the criminals behind bars by the end of the episode. Pretty impressive.

But how does the reality of CSI investigation compare to that told on the screen?

And how do approaches vary around the world?

Well, I'm joined by Zoe Cadwell, senior lecturer in forensic studies at the University of Portsmouth, and Selina Robinson, who's a lecturer in forensic investigation just down the road at the University of Winchester.

So Zoe and Selina, thank you very much for joining me today.

You both used to work in CSI.

So it's not just the academic side of things you guys are involved in.

What drew you to a career in CSI originally, and how did the realities of that actually meet your expectations?

I think I went into crime scene investigation, as we all do, because we have this want to and desire to want to solve a mystery, I suppose.

I think unfortunately suspicious and unsuspicious, deaths are going to be something that continues.

So there's not going to be a lack of that.

And it was really an exciting prospect, a unique career, something physical, something challenging, something that was really cool.

And yeah, I was sadly quite disappointed when I became a crime scene investigator, not because the job wasn't fantastic, not because of the people, but I think the changes that were implemented into the landscape of forensics is is really changing how you do the role.

I think my experience is slightly different because I'm a slightly older than Selina, so I came into the role many, many years ago, over 20 years ago, and at that time it wasn't really well known what this role was and there was no TV shows.

So a lot of people, I think, now see the TV shows and think that's what I want to do.

Where is that?

Exposure wasn't in place.

I'd read books as a child crime books and seen photographs of crime scenes and said, that's what I want to do, even though I didn't know what the job was.

And I actually studied archaeology.

And then, as Selina said, it was about piecing together mysteries.

So as an archaeologist, you excavate pieces of evidence and you look at the surroundings and you pick these tiny little pieces of artefacts

and evidence together and try and interpret what happened for those things to be where they are, where you found them.

And actually that transposes really well into crime scene investigation.

There's actually quite a lot of people who studied archaeology that become crime scene investigators, including Selina.

You did archaeology, didn't you?

Yes.

So it has these transferable skills and it is about that mystery solving and putting jigsaws together with little tiny pieces of evidence.

When I got into the role, it was everything I hoped it would be.

But of course I didn't have all this overexposure and expectation.

And yeah, I got to solve mysteries, not on my own, not Scooby-Do style, but as part of a wider, really important team within policing.

And I really enjoyed it.

And you say they're about the archaeology thing and some people might be listening to that and thinking that's a bit of a stretch.

But actually, you know, Indiana Jones, can I just say, he did a lot of archaeology slash crime scene and running around trying to catch bad guys.

So it's not that much of a jump.

No.

Well, if you think about it as well, we excavate human remains in archaeology.

And that's certainly where I started was excavating human remains, as in undergraduate.

Then I went into postgraduate in forensic archaeology.

So that's my background is forensic archaeology.

So there really it really isn't a leap between archaeology and crime scene investigation at all.

And I suppose, you know, you saying that you've got a fair bit of a difference when you started your career and you started your career.

But I mean, in between that gap you had shows like CSI was huge.

And then you have Bones, I think was another one where again, that was, you know, excavating human remains that were fairly old, all these different shows and programmes.

And what was it about these that you think caught people's attention?

Why were they interested in shows like this?

We saw a massive uptick in applications to crime scene investigation roles once these shows sort of hit the TV.

And I think it is just that I think there's the drama side of it.

Personally, I think they glamorised the role.

CSI, I think was probably the first one, the main one, and it was so glamorous.

They all had perfect hair and perfect nails and heels and a gun, which obviously I've never had.

No one's ever let me.

Have a smoke in the crime scene.

Wear the sunglasses.

Yes.

Yeah.

So I think it was the glamorisation of solving crime.

But for once, it wasn't police officers.

It was people who were using science and some new kind of sexy subjects that perhaps hadn't been explored on TV before.

Yeah.

And when we say CSI, quite often you think of it as just sort of blood and, you know, a murder scene or

a scene where there's a fair amount of stuff going on that's, you know, from a person's body.

But that's not necessarily the case.

Now, you know, in CSI, it's evolved quite significantly, especially with digital advancements.

So how has it changed over the past 20 odd years?

And I think it's such a fast moving field.

So what was advanced five years ago might not actually be as advanced now.

And that's the great thing about forensics, because like there's an appetite for it.

It's always evolving.

It's always advancing, which is great, but it still builds on the foundations of original concepts of recovery.

So fingerprinting hasn't really changed, actually, probably from when you started and when I started.

Even now, what the students are learning is very much the same as what it was,

but there are slightly different techniques, a little bit more advanced about how we analyse it, how we interpret it.

It's it's a holistic approach really that's advancing as opposed to the changes of how we just recover evidence.

I think the major change for me has been DNA.

I started at a time when to recover DNA we had to have a significant, really visible stain so it would be blood or something.

And now, of course, we're down to cellular level of DNA recovery.

So for me, that's the biggest change in technology.

But some of the underlying changes that perhaps we might learn a little bit more about as academics and then hopefully we'll see filter through to practitioners is about how we think as CSI is.

So when I started, there was not much thinking about thinking, and now there's an awful lot of thinking about thinking, how do we do this?

But why do we do it?

Why am I doing this?

And why am I feeling the way I'm feeling?

Am I being biased by anything in this case or in this crime scene that's altering my approach to it?

So for me, that's a really exciting change in development and crime scene investigation

that perhaps people don't talk about so much is definitely the thought processes in the decision making.

As part of your roles as CSI investigators, what were the things you were looking at in particular?

Were there particular crimes that you were focusing on?

I think the biggest myth is that it's all about murder and the TV shows.

I mean, Silent Witness, CSI, other shows that we might mention during this podcast,

they're always predominantly focussed on the most serious crimes, which is murder.

But actually, as crime scene investigators our day to day or bread and butter investigations tend to be what we call volume crimes.

So volume crime is defined as something that happens so frequently.

So it things generally, in a nutshell, is vehicle crime and property crime, say burglaries to houses and burglaries to commercial premises.

So people don't really realise that that's actually what we're kind of doing day in, day out,

what we call the bigger jobs, the major crime jobs are not happening thankfully every day.

And really we're out there talking to members of the public that are victims of crime, and I think that's really the day to day job that that goes unnoticed.

Would you say?

I would agree.

And that actually reminds me of some of the things I've seen in CSI programs where it's if it's a major crime is a team that comes in,

not the local or regional CSI department that covers it.

That's what you tend to find in these dramatised versions of CSI.

Is that the case here?

Would it be another team or would you guys handle because it's your area?

No, not.

So much even area.

I think certainly in Hampshire, if you are sort of you're the lead CSI or the lead crime scene manager, you're the one that controls or manages that scene.

You can probably if as a manager, you could probably say, I want to see a slice to come in and then we can swap after 8 hours just for respite mental health.

But we would never outsource another team to do the job that we'd be doing.

We'd use other teams such as chemical treatment unit, fingerprinting, digital.

So if they want to come and do three sixty cameras or U.V.

lighting or something more specialist that we don't have in our backpack when we're at that crime scene, but they outsource.

Yeah, I think I think the main way to look at it is there's two levels in most police forces.

There's two levels of CSI, a level one and a level two.

They might have slightly different names depending on different forces.

Call their staff different titles.

But essentially you're you're trained initially to do the volume crime work, and then you get trained to be able to do the major crime work.

And then above that, you can be trained to be a crime scene manager.

Say that's the person that's in charge of the staff at that scene.

But it is the the the county employed or the police force employed

CSIs that will come whoever is on duty, whoever's got the required training, come and do that scene.

But as Selina says, we might bring specialists in from what we call forensic science providers.

So they are the laboratories that work externally to the police where we submit our evidence for analysis.

So these might be blood spatter

experts say that forensic biologists, if it's a shooting, they may be a forensic ballistic expert.

And of course, the pathologists that we see in so many of the TV programs is an external person

as well that may come to the scene, but more likely will encounter them at the mortuary.

But the actual people examining that scene are the CSIs that were employed in that area, in that geographical area.

And when you go into a scene, who's in charge? Because again, it can get quite confusing when you watch these shows.

Is it the detective?

Is it the crime scene investigator? Who who's technically responsible for managing that scene at that time?

I don't think anybody would like to use the word in-charge.

But in a volume crime scene, it's the CSI, because there's usually just you there.

You're the only person there with the victim of crime.

So it's up to in a major crime, it's the crime scene manager.

So they work out the strategy with the senior investigating officer.

They work out the forensic strategy, what's priority, what needs to be done in the order things are done.

And the CSI is do follow that strategy.

It's very rare for detectives to be in the scene.

That's another thing that's quite unusual in the TV shows.

In my experience, the CIA certainly is in is very busy in a briefing room at headquarters coordinating lots and lots of investigative leads.

So they are not there walking around the scene.

It tends to just be the forensic team, because with advances in technology now as well, we can get our images out to the briefing room

from the scene really quickly so that that way we can minimise the number of people that are in that scene, which is really important for contamination.

And you said a second ago sometimes you have to change shift if you're there for 8 hours or more.

I mean, how long can crime scene investigations be opened for?

I think how long's piece of string really?

Volume crime of of always going to actually be quicker,

especially if it's just yourself in a two bedroom house, one bedroom flat, you know, that's going to be quicker.

Sometimes they do take longer if it's a lovely affluent property, six bedrooms, but

major crimes, depending on the type of crime, depending on how many resources you need.

Because if we do need to call from forensic specialism within the department, then we need to wait for them to arrive.

We need to wait for them to finish, and then we can go back in and support it.

Yeah, but I think the crime scene managers that I've worked with have been really good at trying to manage the welfare

of the crime scene investigators within the scene of the major crime.

So it's usually, can I go to get a coffee, can I get anyone some lunch?

But usually I feel we're quite the same.

Once you're in there, you just want to just want to do it.

Just want to get as much done.

Do as much as you can do before you absolutely have to clock off.

And then in those circumstances, where may have to go into the next sort of shifts,

they'll seal the property up, have a guard at the door or outside of the area, and then you have to return the next day.

I think I've had scenes that've been open for weeks and go back every day and then it tails off to a point and things get left.

Then you go back because it just gets sealed and 

there's certain other things or other specialists that need to come.

So I think you can fully expect sort of long 12, 15 hour days in the initial stages of a murder enquiry,

and then that might tail off in terms of how many times you need to revisit.

But I remember a murder scene where I had to revisit it a number of times over about three or four weeks.

And then you've got after that, usually for contamination reasons, the CSI is at work, at the scene, tend to be the ones that go to the post-mortem

because we only have a finite number of CSIs.

So you can use a new set and they've already been in contact with the body and then a post mortem can last,

I think the quickest forensic post-mortem I've ever been to is about 30 minutes, and the longest was about 10 hours.

Eight or 10 hours, I think.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It sounds like such a challenging environment and I think that's fair, most people would say that sounds like a very challenging environment.

And you mentioned about mindfulness and how they check in on you to make sure that you know you're okay and that you've had a break and, you know, rested a little bit.

Has that always been the case in CSI or was that fairly new?

I was just going to say Selina was saying that that is another huge change.

I haven't been practising as a CSI for nearly nine years.

The only scene I've been on there since then was the Grenfell Tower fire, where I worked as a consultant and I noticed the huge difference in welfare at that scene to where I've worked previously.

Thankfully this does seem to have come a long way.

There's things like, you know, we did have incident support trucks and things like that, but certainly the concept of the impact on your mental health, both from working long hours and the type of work that we do, is much more understood.

But there's an awful lot more research that needs to take place.

But yeah, really, I think thankfully these things have changed because there certainly wasn't.

Unfortunately, when I started in for a long time, you signed up for it.

You knew what you were signing up for.

I was 22.

I did not know what I was signing up for.

So I find that attitude a little bit stale and I still see it on Twitter.

I saw it the other week, someone saying, you're CSI, You knew what you signed up for

and I'm sorry, but I don't think anyone really knows that they're signing up for hours and hours and hours in covered in flies and maggots and blood

and horrible smells with no access to a toilet or refreshment or anything like that.

So I think that's another myth that we do need to bust in that we're actually humans.

And thankfully, police forces are now catching on to the fact that CSIs need the support that perhaps police officers have been getting for a little bit longer.

I feel like we've touched on some of, you know, that scenario sounds like CSI,

Why would you do that job?

But you did do that job.

I mean, Zoe as well, you're looking to go back into it.

So what is it about CSI that you guys love?

It's just every day is different and you're always going to be tested even if you start to think, oh, have just about got that technique.

And then there's going to be another scene that pops up or there's another person you interact with that you think, oh, okay, now I get to do something different.

So it constantly challenges you I think.

It is an exciting job.

It was the best job I've ever had, don't get me wrong.

But, you know, I think at the time for me, I couldn't deal with the the time and the requirements because I had a six month old at the time.

So that was the only reason really that I couldn't I'd like to think, pursue it.

And yet there's a changing landscape of forensics at the moment, but it's such an amazing job, I would think.

I think there's new challenges now, and I'm very interested in those new challenges.

So I'm looking to see what these challenges look like in reality and how that's actually working for practitioners.

I very much, I think I'll always have my research head on now that I've been working in academia, and I think that's a really interesting view to bring into crime scene investigation.

But as Selina says, the fundamental fact is every single day is different.

You meet everybody from every single walk of life you could imagine and some that you couldn't imagine.

You will encounter experiences that you didn't even know you could possibly do.

And then also the thing that I really love about it is it doesn't matter how much experience you have, you are experienced.

So I remember as a ten year experienced CSI,

never having been to a particular type of scene that our newest recruit had been to so I could go to them for advice.

And I think that is fantastic to say,

there is so many infinite number of experiences we can have in this role.

We can all appreciate each other and appreciate each other's experience and learn from each other.

And there's so much to learn.

I've been in forensics for over 20 years and I'm still learning every single day, and that's what excites me about being back

probably on the front line is learning more.

Can't stop learning about it.

It sounds incredibly rewarding.

And we can take a quick break.

If you're enjoying this episode of Life Solved, then why not

check out Who Polices the Police featuring Dr. John Fox.

John looks at the vetting process of police forces across the UK and also who's in charge of holding officers to account.

Search for the episode whether you listen to podcasts.

And so back to the sort of the myths and misconceptions around CSI,

a lot of the stuff that we see, which is dramatised is from the U.S., I think it's fair to say we do have some shows here.

You mentioned Silent Witness.

There are quite a few police, famous police shows now as well.

I used to watch The Bill a lot.

I used to love The Bill.

But is there a difference between countries that people aren't necessarily aware of?

Do you find that when you chat to people about the role of a CSI, they say, oh, I know that this happens, but actually that's not the case in the UK.

But is the case somewhere else?

Yeah, I think our first year students, well the first lecture I have with them, I always do this sort of myth busting.

So what do you know about forensic science?

What do you know about crime scene investigation?

And one of the things that comes up every year is the role of the coroner,

because in the the shows sorry, from the USA, the coroner is essentially what we would call the forensic pathologist.

So the person that does the post-mortem or the autopsy in in America,

and often they come to the scene and no one's allowed to do anything with the body until the coroner has been and they examine the body at the scene, etc..

Here, that's a forensic pathologist.

And our coroner is a very different role and is a completely different person.

So the coroner does not come to the scene in the UK.

The forensic pathologist might and they undertake the post-mortem, not the coroner.

So we have a distinction in terms of wording, I think, and roles there.

That's the main thing that I pick up on the difference between shows in the countries, but there's differences in practice as well.

We know that from the research literature and from speaking to practitioners in other countries as well,

that we do have very different, not always very, but some different approaches to how we undertake these roles.

And also I think it's probably fair to say in other countries, the role of the CSI as a police officer, and I think that's something we need to bust as well.

In the UK.

You do not need to be a police officer first to become a CSI.

You get the job as a CSI and you're trained on the job.

In the US predominantly, you are a police officer, sworn police officer, and then you train to be a CSI.

And that's the case in many other countries.

Australia is the same, but it's moving.

I think there are some police staff CSI now.

I think it's moving towards that.

But yeah, I did a master's degree in forensic science a few years ago and I did a module in forensic biology with an American university

and they taught me about air drying swaps.

So we wet and dry, for example, dry bloodstains is our method for recovery, and then we freeze those swaps.

But in the US, or particularly where I, the state that I was being taught this module, they were teaching us to air dry.

And I spoke to the the lecturer and I said, oh, that's very, very different to what we do if we ever tried them

that would be an issue in terms of contamination and also related to how they were packaging and storing them.

And we had a really, really interesting conversation about it.

Well, thank you both so much for joining me today.

It's been a really interesting conversation and hopefully some people who have listened will walk away

and feel a little bit better informed about what CSI is and what your jobs are.

Because of TV and film dramas we've already got a picture of how CSI works and the terms used in forensics.

Hopefully in this episode we've corrected a few things and given an idea of how it works in reality.

If you'd like to listen to our full episode of Life Solved discussing the world of forensic science,

head to the University of Portsmouth website or download it on your favourite podcast app now.

You can click the link in the comments box below or head to port.ac.uk/research

to find out more about Zoe's work here at the University of Portsmouth.

Next time how seaweed is "kelping" to clean up our oceans.

I didn't write that.

See you then.