This Isn't Primetime Television, It's The Real 'CSI: Menomonee Falls'

Note: This is the sixth of 13 weekly updates about your Patch editor's journey though the Menomonee Falls Citizen's Police Academy.

Cue the dramatic music, roll the montage of police tape and body bags, and prepare the solemn and suspenseful dialogue. It’s time for CSI: Menomonee Falls.

Although television highly dramatizes the work crime scene investigators do, we were told Tuesday at the Citizen’s Academy to throw all those perceptions out the window. Once we cleared our heads of primetime crime dramas, we got our detective glasses out and tried our hands at finding evidence.

Finger smears, lipstick marks, hair, fingernails and boogers are all things that we don't spend much time thinking about in our day-to-day lives. However, finding one of these could make an evidence field technician’s day.

The detectives and officers in the crime scene investigation unit are some of the most observant and thorough officers on the staff. In fact, their job is a lot like a journalist’s in a sense.

The primary tool for a field evidence technician is the camera. Every piece of evidence they find is photographed first, then processed and taken from the scene. A newbie on the CSI unit will spend a significant amount of time early on just learning to take good pictures.

But once a photograph is taken, field techs have an array of tools that even Dick Tracy would envy. Officers can pull a footprint from the ground using an electrostatic machine, or they can don specialized goggles and utilize a light machine to find fingerprints.

However, a lot of the tools used to locate evidence are very basic. Simply shining a flashlight parallel to the ground can reveal a treasure trove of evidence highlighted by the light. Of course, an ostrich-feather brush and volcanic ash is the most popular form of gathering fingerprints.

Most surprising, to me at least, was the pivotal role Super Glue plays in the process of gathering evidence. Items with fingerprints on them are placed inside a container, and a few drops of super glue are heated up. The vapor from the Super Glue reacts with the amino acids in a fingerprint, and hardens the print to preserve it. The end result is a print that’s easier to detect, and smudge proof.

A One and Done Job

If you are clumsy, lax when it comes to the details, and find yourself saying “whoops” quite often, a crime scene is the last place you should be. After a crime is committed, a wealth of evidence is waiting to be discovered, as long as it isn’t disturbed.

“We get one shot at it. Evidence is incredibly fragile,” said Detective Eric Henning.

Like previous Citizen’s Academy classes, Tuesday’s class exposed my own ineptitude at police work.

After struggling for a good 15 minutes to get the right amount of dust atop a fingerprint on a soda cup, I was ready to lift the print with specialized tap. Without going into the entire process, I ended up getting half a smudged fingerprint – and I needed a redo.

However, I redeemed myself later in the night by making an excellent plaster pour into a footprint in the dirt. The plaster is used to get a mold of the footprint so officers can get a distinctive shoeprint that could lead to catching a criminal.

Of course, I had help from Principal Dr. Gary Kiltz making the pour. We’ll se how we did next week.

In the end, the job of an evidence technician is a lot of time in the lab, careful documentation and attention to detail. Although reality doesn’t make for the most compelling television, it doesn’t make their job any less interesting.

And anyone tempted to commit a crime, just be aware there is an entire section of the police department filled with evidence of every kind. You may have covered all your bases during a crime, but a loose hair or, dare I say a booger, could lead to your arrest.