the timboucher experience

No wonder television has been flooded for the past several years with ads for vocational schools to teach forensic science. It seems that the Justice Department is rolling out an “experimental program” (ie, a new initiative that they won’t announce until the kinks are all worked out and it’s too late to turn back) which would expand hardcore forensic and DNA analysis to routine crimes, rather than just violent ones.

Wired news has the dirty details:

The days when car thieves and cat burglars could cover their tracks just by donning a pair of gloves may be over. An experimental Justice Department program has police departments collecting DNA evidence in nonviolent crimes for the first time, so a single stray hair can lock up a casual sneak thief.

Until recently, DNA evidence was used almost solely to investigate violent offenses such as murders or rapes — CSI kinds of stuff. The Department of Justice hopes to expand that focus. As part of a five-year, $1 billion White House initiative, the department has launched an 18-month program in five major cities to get cops to apply CSI-style DNA-analysis techniques to routine crimes. [...]

Around 800 police in Denver had to be trained in new methods of evidence gathering, according to Stanford. Cops learned to pull on their latex gloves and look everywhere for clues. In the garbage. In the fridge. Maybe even, alas, in the toilet. Police in other cities have done the same.

“The devil is in the details,” says Kathy Browning, a social-science analyst at the National Institute of Justice, or NIJ, the research-and-development branch of the Justice Department that oversees the DNA program and hands out grants. “This isn’t just about more lab technicians. This a new way of thinking about crimes.”

This was bound to happen, of course. And as far as I am concerned is further proof of the technocracy being ramped up: police work being fused with hard science. Although, in turn this ends up having other consequences within the culture as well: see my article, The CSI Theory of History.

• CSI For Kids
• High Tech Crime & Futuristic Security
• Threads of History [*]
• Aleph meets resistance
• The CSI Theory of History