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Crime dramas favor fiction over fact
New criminal justice students face realities not seen on television
By Geof Wollerman
gwollerm@mscd.edu

Photo by Jenn LeBlanc • jkerriga@mscd.edu Professor Robert Whitson holds up a piece of evidence from a mock crime scene his comparative criminal justice class investigated in March 2006.

Professors say the popularity of law enforcement television shows like CSI may be encouraging students to take an interest in criminal justice, but may also be distorting their perception of real police work.

The annual number of graduates from Metro’s criminal justice program rose to 197 in 2005-2006, making the program the second most popular at Metro, according to the Office of Institutional Research.

“The trend over the last 25 years has been continuous growth,” criminal justice professor Joseph Sandoval said. “It’s simply that over the last ten years it’s increased significantly.”

And the program’s popularity is most likely due to shows like CSI, but students might be in for a surprise when they find out what law enforcement is really like, Sandoval said.

“The glamour that’s associated with the crime scene, with that kind of activity, is generally misplaced,” he said. Crime scene investigators are “not as popular as (CSI) would have you believe,” he said.

The show portrays special investigators solving complex and gruesome crimes, but Sandoval made clear that it is not accurate in its depictions.

At a real crime scene, the CSI officer may simply be an adjunct to the overall investigation, and the detective will still have control.

The investigative work shown on CSI involves a lot of lab work and requires a strong academic background in chemistry and anatomy, said Melinda Garner, a junior in the criminal justice program. Interested students might decide against the career track when they find out the schoolwork involved is more rigorous than expected.

“Chemistry’s a very hard field. (Students) have no idea … what the job is all about,” she said. “When you’re investigating a crime scene, you have to have the intelligence and information to know how to investigate it. If somebody’s dead, and they need to figure out how the person died – What was the cause of death? Did they get murdered? How can I tell? Well, let’s go into the anatomy of the body.”

Because evidence appears so readily on CSI and everything is conveniently connected, people get the impression that solving cases is easy, Garner said.

“People think, ‘Oh my gosh, how easy that looks, and how much fun that is. Look at all the technology they can use.’ When in all reality it’s not going to be that easy,” she said.

Law enforcement television shows are definitely not accurate, criminal justice student Rhea Booz said.

“I think that some people who actually get into it and realize really what it is that you have to learn to be a CSI – I mean, it’s daunting. The chemistry is just overwhelming,” she said. “So I think maybe that (students) have a little disillusionment there, that it’s a little bit harder and that it’s a little bit more boring.”

Booz said she used to watch CSI a lot more but the show was not why she went into criminal justice.

“Now that I’m further along in my degree and I realize the reality of things, I watch it less and less, and I enjoy it less and less,” Booz said. “It’s the drama of life, and you can’t show that accurately in an hour. You just can’t.”

Last semester, criminal justice professor Allison Cotton, whose background is in criminology, brought in actor Matthew Gray Gubler from the show Criminal Minds to speak to a class about what it’s like to play a criminologist.

It was interesting and exciting for the class, but Gubler’s character does not reflect the work of a real criminologist, Cotton said.

“There are very few elite units like the television show Criminal Minds,” she said. The show is centered on a team of five agents trained in everything from behavioral science to drugs to explosives. In the real world, no such criminologists exist.

“As criminologists we basically study and write reports. We publish,” Cotton said. “We don’t carry guns, we don’t know anything about drugs or explosives. And so those television shows really put everything in a very unrealistic light.”

Criminal justice students may be initially influenced by television shows, but Cotton believes this just gives professors the chance to show them what the field is really like.

“I think we have an influx of students who are interested in forensic science, who are interested in criminal justice because they don’t understand what forensic science is,” she said. “You basically have a degree in some type of science, and you are not an agent.”

Also, people involved in forensics are generally civilians and are rarely called to the scene of a crime, she added.

“The people who are the forensic scientists are the people who are analyzing blood samples and stuff like that,” Cotton said. “They sit in a lab all day, every day, for months on end, before anything breaks in the case. So their jobs are much more monotonous than the television shows.”

Shows like CSI definitely influence students, criminal justice professor Hal Nees said, and their content does not reflect real life.

“Ninety-five percent of what you see on TV has nothing to do with the reality of criminal justice,” he said. “(Some people) think that CSIs run the investigations. They don’t. … Investigators run the investigations.”

Employees on the scientific side of cases usually hold doctorate degrees, and are intended to be technicians, Nees said. “They’re good quality, intelligent people who know what they’re doing, but they are not investigators,” he said.

The people who investigate crime scenes are, for the most part, detectives, Sandoval said, adding, “And in order to get that assignment you have to spend time as a police officer.”

After completing a 16-week academy program and an additional four-month training program, new college graduates will generally spend five to 10 years as an officer in order to become a detective, said Virginia Quinones, a Denver police detective.

In terms of CSI work, it depends what sort of law enforcement department in which you find a job.

For instance, she said, Denver has a crime lab, but a lot of its employees are civilians with specialized backgrounds.

“There’s no guarantee at all that that’s where you’ll end up,” Quinones said.