The officers who work in Crime Scene Management (CSM) are referred to as Crime Scene Technicians. They are an integral part of every major investigation.   Technicians respond to all types of incidents that require evidence collection and scene documentation.  

Technicians receive training in a variety of areas that will help them identify, collect, and evaluate the pertinent information from the crime scene.  This training involves photography, scene diagramming, evidence collection and packaging, blood spray pattern analysis, latent fingerprint retrieval, and other forensic skills. 

Each Technician is issued a vehicle which is equipped with a variety of tools to aid them in their responsibilities.  Technicians are allowed to take their crime scene vehicles home. This enables them to provide a quicker response time when they are summoned to an investigation.  Since technicians are few in number, they share call-out duty on a rotating basis to ensure 24-hour a day coverage.

Whenever a serious crime or traffic accident occurs, the first-responding officers understand that it is important to secure the scene in order to preserve any incident-related evidence.   There may be a time when you happen upon a crime/accident scene and it appears that little is being done.  In  most instances, the scene has been "frozen" awaiting the arrival of a Crime Scene Technician, or a search warrant to enter and process the scene.  During this phase of the investigation, all other officers must remain outside the established perimeter until the evidence has been collected.  Scene processing can take several hours or several days.  Each scene is unique.

One aspect of scene documentation that occasionally triggers frustration or anger among family members is when a victim's body is not immediately removed from the scene.  Frequently, the victim is left undisturbed, lying in a car, on the ground, or in the street.  Some people have mistakenly accused the police of being insensitive and disrespectful of the body and/or the victim's family. Nothing could be further from the truth!   In fact, this is  the ultimate form of respect to the victim.  Although the victim is unable to verbally convey what happened, the victim's body and its positioning may convey enormous amounts of forensic information about the cause of death and who may be responsible. Technicians will carefully photograph, take measurements, and collect all visible evidence before the victim is moved.  They may continue to take photos as the victim is being moved, to illustrate evidence found underneath the body.  Sometimes this can take several hours. 

It's important to understand that Crime Scene Technicians are not experts in all areas of forensic science, but they are trained to properly collect evidence so that it can be shipped to laboratories for analysis.  Our technicians work closely with the Indiana State Police Laboratory, the FWPD Lab, and the Allen County Coroner's office.

Another task managed by CSM is the duplication of video-evidence obtained by the in-car cameras mounted in most FWPD squad cars.  This evidence is regularly requested by prosecutors and defense attorneys in preparation for trial.  Every squad car videotape contains a variety of "episodes" that have been recorded over a period of days or weeks.  CSM Technicians will isolate the requested incident-images on the master tape and copy the information to another tape for court.