I "read" a book recently called Crime Scene Investigation, Philosophy, Practice, and Science by Professor Robert C. Shaler of Pennsylvania State University.
This is part of The Modern Scholar series, where exceptional Professors with excellent lectures get a chance to record it and put it in an audiobook. These versions always have the Professor/author read or perform the class themselves. The disadvantage when an author reads his own book is that the typical author does not have a good speaking/reading voice.
In this case, the Professor has a pretty good voice, as he's used to delivering lectures, but he has a definite New York or Philadelphia accent. There is a stereotype of people with this accent to those of us in the Midwest. This stereotype is obviously not fair to everyone, but often people from the thickly populated area near New York City have a belligerent and condescending way of speaking. There is a tough guy kind of bravado and a know-it-all sound to the way some from that region say anything, it seems. This guy had this voice in spades.
What he had to say was also in that vein. I was describing the course to my brother a few days after I started listening to it, and I told him that this guy knows everything and everyone else is completely full of shit. That's the way he came across, and I kept waiting for him to get over it and start describing the science of Crime Scene Investigation. He never really did.
To be fair, he imparted a lot of information, but the attitude that it was delivered with was way too distracting for me. I kept waiting for him to explain why methods that he deemed to be erroneous or misguided had ever been attempted in the first place. My expectation was that people would approach the science of something as complicated as crime with a early theory based on some kind of logic, which would later be superseded by more modern science or more thorough methods. The way Professor Shaler presents it, everyone was stumbling around in the dark, hampered by their own incompetence, until he showed up to shine his brilliance down on the field.
That's a pretty harsh assessment, and I don't mean to take away from the obvious intelligence of the guy and his mastery of the field. I am frustrated by my own inability to ignore the tone of the lectures, and I feel it distracted me from understanding the subject as well as I could. One last criticism, though, is that he would often state what he thought was the correct method, or the clear facts of a subject, but he would rarely explain how they got to the point where they figured that out. I was hoping and expecting to hear a little of the history of the science, like in the Poisoner's Handbook by Deborah Blum.
One of early facts about Professor Shuler that made me think that he was a pretty heavy hitter was that he was head of the Forensics Department in New York City, he pioneered the use of DNA evidence, and was responsible for identifying the victims of 9/11. He also mentioned Kansas City, which lead me to believe he had been here before. I had the impression that he had worked here, but perhaps he had simply advised the unit here. I kept listening for more information on this, but there was none.
That leaves us with actual subject matter. The thing that really stuck with me is how violent people can be. The matter of fact way that he described people that would continue to beat a person long after they were dead sticks in my mind. It also was quite telling when they went over blood splatter pattern analysis. You don't think about a wounded human as some kind of blood geyser. It's impressive, when you think of it, just the fact that people are inflicting damage on their fellow human beings in such an overwhelming way that blood is splattering 15 feet in the air.
In the end, I thought that the techniques are interesting and they do an amazing job of solving crimes. However, I cannot imagine that there are enough scientists, let alone investigators to truly study all crime scenes. On one hand, you get the impression that police forces are stretched thin. On the other hand, you get the idea that there is no such thing as the perfect crime, and no way to commit a crime without the strong possibility that YOU WILL GET CAUGHT.
