Look at the blood spatter.

Bang, bang, bang.

Fingerprints.

Luminol test.

My name is Matthew Steiner.

[Narrator] Matt Steiner is a senior crime scene analyst

and veteran investigator of over 21 years.

Today we're gonna breakdown the potrayal

of forensic science in TV and movies.

As we're critiquing these clips, understand that their goal

is to entertain and they definitely do that.

The Wire trajectory analysis.

(rustling)

first off, the gun safety in this

was comical and not realistic.

You wouldn't take a loaded weapon

and start waving it around in crime scenes.

[Bunk] Oh, fuck.

Initially the original crime scene investigator

on the scene should of took note of directionality.

Mother fuck.

We do that by looking at conchoidal fracturing

of glass to see which direction a force is going.

[Bunk] Aw fuck, aw fuck.

So we would have known in this case originally

that the bullet was coming from outside

to the inside of the kitchen.

So what they do from that point is,

they try to figure what would the

trajectory line be from that bullet hole

through a deceased body, which way was that bullet going?

[Bunk] Fuckin' A.

Lo and behold,

there is the bullet in the door.

Motherfucker.

From that point,

I think we deviate from reality.

We wouldn't just start picking at that hole.

They could be destroying rifling that's on that bullet.

And that's what really,

we're gonna send to the lab to do some sort of analysis

compared to a suspect's gun.

Motherfucker.

NCIS, personal protective equipment.

(snapshots)

Whew.

I know rule number two is always wear gloves but,

when there's this much blood...

Rain gear.

In the truck.

So in this scene,

they actually talk about

wearing personal protective equipment.

Rain gear.

Yet, no one is wearing any sort of garb.

What happened?

Everyone is wearing just like a jumpsuit,

or their regular attire,

and just gloves.

Basically, you would never wanna do that.

Well apparently, that one did.

Beyond that, our

crime scene technician, he's taking photographs,

he then wipes his brow,

then he handles evidence.

Basically, what he's done,

he's taken DNA that was on that camera, on his brow,

and put it onto

our evidence on the scene.

And then, proceeds to have a whole conversation

while holding that evidence right by his face.

Did you see The Counselor?

That was a pretty good movie.

Again, improper procedure for

collection of DNA evidence.

He could have been wearing a Tyvek suit,

a mask, he may even wanna wear goggles or glasses,

and multiple layers of gloves.

Rule number two is always wear gloves.

I would strip out the outer layer of glove,

put another layer of gloves on top of it,

and then proceed to collect evidence.

I think I found that out, boss.

Recovering evidence, Zodiac.

Kay, looks like he wiped the cab down pretty good.

We got some blood over here.

Prints?

Could very well be.

Initial observations is that

the vehicle might've been wiped down.

Which you can see sometimes with oblique lighting

at a scene.

You can see sometimes fingerprints so,

that's a pretty good observation.

As we proceed to the other side of the vehicle,

there's a shell casing on the driver's side front floor,

which wasn't marked or photographed

as far as I could tell.

Oh, well that's good.

Yeah, things gotta be documented in situ, or as is,

as found.

He just pics it up with a pen.

Where has that pen been beforehand?

You know, was it in your hand?

Was it in your ear?

Was it in your nose?

Right here.

You know, it's got DNA from who knows where?

I don't know where this started.

Unfortunately, I've seen this in real life.

If anything, this is like a PSA

of what not to do at a crime scene,

that's one of those big things

you wouldn't wanna do at a crime scene.

I'm an idiot.

Tire impression evidence, The Flash.

Getaway car's a Mustang Shelby GT500.

Shelbys have a rear super wide tire

specific to that model.

12 inches with an asymmetrical tread.

I don't think anyone,

just by looking at a tire impression to say it came

from a specific vehicle.

Sorry.

We would do some sort of dental stone casting

of that impression.

Recover it, send it to the lab,

and then there's a database which they can search

to say what sort of vehicles it could come from.

There's something else.

(suspenseful music)

Thanks.

And there's a pen again

being used to collect evidence...

My dad gave me that pen...

Which is improper.

Before he died.

Another thing you wouldn't do

is if anything is inside of our impression at our scene,

we would leave it there.

We would cast it in place.

We wouldn't sample it.

Because you could be destroying treadwear

inside that impression.

Yeah, yeah I did.

After he samples with the pen...

Fecal excrement.

Animal, I'd guess.

I don't know how he would know the difference between

human and animal feces.

Which I don't think is realistic.

Uh, no.

Loaded Weapon, examining a body.

One raspberry push-up, one orange.

(background music)

So what are we looking at here, doc?

The worst dressed stiff I've ever seen.

This stiff and I pounded a beat together

for five years

so show some respect.

So it's common for TV and movies to

present crime scene investigation in this fashion

where we have

all these different people doing a million different things

all at once inside of a crime scene.

That means it's working.

We would want that crime scene clear.

We wouldn't want anyone in there

except the people who are doing the investigation.

In real life, not that we would make fun of

someone who is dead...

Show some respect.

But there is a certain gallows humor

that goes along with crime scene investigation

and death investigation.

And it's one of the ways to cope with it

is to adopt this type of humor.

(laughs)

I know.

Crime scene analysis as portrayed in Boondock Saints.

You got any theories to go with that tie?

He was the only done right.

Double-tap in the back of the head.

[Paul] And the pennies?

New hit man wants to leave his mark.

That's a possibility.

Another possibility is they were placed there with

religious intent.

In this scene,

they focus too much on the why the crime happened.

What is the symbolism there?

Crime scene analysis usually deals with

the who, the what, the where...

Ah shit, I forgot about that one.

The when, the how of something,

but never the why.

Kinda makes me feel like river dancing.

The why has to do with motive

and there's no way that we can prove why with science.

(laughs)

Heat crime scene analysis.

Is this guy here,

has got what appears to be a double-tap entry wound

to the sternum.

Tattooing around the head wound scorched bone

close range, probably executed.

In this scene, we have our,

I'm assuming he's a crime scene investigator.

He makes an assumption that

a gun shot entry wound was at close range.

Entry wound to the sternum, close range.

We can make those

determinations.

When you fire a gun, besides the bullet

that comes out of the barrel,

we have burning and unburned gun powder.

What difference does it make?

That burning gun powder will go a certain distance.

Bang.

We then also have unburned gun powder

that goes a further distance than that.

Bang.

And then, obviously, the bullet goes the

furthest distance.

Bang bang bang.

So, we'll look at

the injuries,

we'll look at whether there is burning,

and then we'll look for other things like stippling.

And that is the abrasions caused by

the unburned gun powder abrading the skin.

Okay, what about them?

Not having the weapon itself,

you really couldn't say exactly,

but we could take that weapon and the same ammunition,

bring it to ballistics and do several test firings

at different distances

to replicate that pattern.

To see if we get the same

diameter of

gun shot residue and burning.

Rock and roll.

Fingerprint evidence, Seven.

Oh, man.

Well I could tell you guys

just by looking at the swirl pattern

they're not the victim's fingerprints.

This is kind of overkill.

It's probably 'cause it looked cool

is the reason they put the alternate light source in there

with fluorescent powder.

They really coulda kept doing

just regular black powder,

probably is what we woulda done in the field.

You're kidding me.

It's like prescribing brain surgery for a headache.

So many freaks out there.

Beyond that, the techniques aren't that great

because they're using

too much powder and then they're using

compressed air to blow out the friction ridge detail.

We would never do that.

Jodie Foster told me to do it.

Also, right here,

he calls it a swirl pattern.

Just by looking at the swirl pattern.

Swirl pattern.

There's no such thing as a swirl pattern.

There's arches, loops, and whorls.

So there's some parts of this that are true,

but a lot of it is fantasy.

[Mills] The voices made me do it.

Processing a vehicle, The Other Guys.

We found a lot of stuff.

And bodily fluid and hair samples

we determined that a bunch of old homeless dudes

and an orgy in the car.

Oh, God.

So what they get right in the scene is that

they're processing it indoors,

they bring it to a garage.

And that's what you wanna do in real life.

Yeah, and then to top it all off,

some joker comes along,

I think he knew you guys were cops

because this is what I would call

a spite shit.

Also the attire of our crime scene technicians

is correct.

Oh yeah.

They're all wearing personal protective equipment,

Tyvek suits, gloves, masks.

Dirty Mike and the Boys.

Which is funny, this is a comedy,

but they got it right.

[Officer Watts] Found a deer vagina.

The rest of it is just

kind of silly and funny.

Determining, you know,

that it was a spite shit.

Or that

you know, there was a deer vagina...

What?

Or homeless guys had an orgy inside the car.

It's just kind of funny

but very unrealistic.

You turned my beautiful bridge into a nightmare!

How to Get Away With Murder, detecting latent blood.

(dark pop music)

They didn't find anything.

So, in this clip,

way too many people inside this crime scene.

All doing random things at once.

Just like we saw with the

Loaded Weapon clip.

Some people have gloves on, some people don't.

No one is wearing a Tyvek suit or booties.

And probably the biggest cardinal sin

is that we have the suspect inside the scene.

How much longer?

Yeah, that's not reality at all.

What?

They start pulling out knives out of a knife block

and they swab,

but they swab one side of the blade,

not the other side of the blade.

Nor do they swab the handle.

Seems like a foolish move.

The last step was to do

Luminol testing.

And that's a chemical

we use inside of crime scenes to look for

latent blood.

Everyone would have been cleared out

of the room at that point.

It's a possibility that

Luminol is carcinogenic, so you'd be wearing a mask

as well as a Tyvek suit.

Oh you're being paranoid.

But, you know, they just start randomly

spraying the chemicals and everyone else is around

breathing it, that's a no no.

Or maybe he's just being smart.

It's also using

some sort of UV light with it

or some sort of blue light with it.

Luminol, you don't need that.

You don't need any sort of alternate light source.

You just make the room dark,

you spray it in combination with hydrogen peroxide,

and if there's a reaction, it will glow.

I'm gonna run what's called

a Luminol test.

So this is where they actually do get it right.

(spritzing noises)

Later on, he's called out

for diluting the blood by spraying too much Luminol.

The more Luminol you spray, the more you dilute the blood.

In real life, we'd be very careful

on how much of the chemical we're gonna add.

There's other chemicals that will react

in glow or chemiluminesce

in reaction to Luminol.

Okay, alright, I get it.

Ballistic and fingerprint analysis in The Dark Knight.

That's brick underneath.

Gonna take ballistics off a shattered bullet?

No.

Fingerprints.

Recovery technique is pretty good.

We would try to cut it out of the wall.

(gun shot)

This is your original scan.

Here it is re-engineered.

And there's the thumbprint he left

when he pushed the round in the clip.

Ah, this is completely impossible.

Yeah.

It's not based on any sort of science.

Fair enough.

The rifling inside the barrel

is gonna create

markings on that bullet.

Which woulda destroyed a fingerprint that was there anyway,

let alone, the extreme heat that woulda burnt off

most of the fingerprint.

Good luck.

Blood stain pattern analysis as portrayed in Dexter.

The male victim was standing

right here

and the killer plunged his knife

into the shoulder, severing the carotid artery and...

(fart noise)

Here in this scene, we have Dexter

doing blood stain pattern analysis.

Now over here, you have nice, clean sprays of blood.

He gets the description and categorization

of the blood stain patterns correct.

Clean and easy.

But that's really about it.

(fart noise)

First off, those types of patterns,

you would never do that sort of reconstruction for.

You would never do stringing for

arterial gushing or a cast-off

because there's no way that you could figure out

exactly where it came from.

Hey.

You never know.

As opposed to some sort of impact spatter

from a gunshot, or from someone that was beaten with a bat.

So we're looking for a sushi chef.

Looks like just someone just took a bucket of

red paint and

threw it on one wall

and then someone kind of

randomly squirted blood on another wall.

This looks like a finger painting.

Then the cast-off,

they don't look realistic.

They're a little more linear than that.

They sometimes can be curvy linear,

depending on how you're moving your hand.

But to say it definitely came from a sharp knife

not a sword,

there's not really any way to say

the exact object that it came from.

Yeah, sushi chef is possible.

Insomnia, autopsy.

Clear cause of death was herniation of the brain stem

due to intracerebral hemorrhage.

Beaten to death.

These contusions?

[Medical Examiner] Superficial.

Most of the trauma was to her face and the top of her neck.

First off, what I don't like about

the portrayal of this, which they do sometimes

in these shows is that

someone's gotta turn on a light.

Not this time.

You know, we'd want it

as much light as possible.

Told you.

It didn't appear that there was even

an autopsy done.

But there's gonna be.

There was no Y incision on our

deceased.

So to say that the neck injury is superficial,

how would you even know that

without actually looking at it...

I don't know.

To see how that part of the tissue is damaged

or if the hyoid bone was broken or fractured?

Beaten to death.

There's no way to know just by doing a visual inspection

to see that sort of thing.

Told you, body gave us nothing.

At the end, you know,

he's handling the body.

He takes his gloves off and then touches her hair.

She could be bleeding from the head

and now you're taking your bare hand

and touching her blood.

Didn't even blink.

And then maybe later on,

having a sandwich, or whatever

so it's kind of ridiculous.

This guy,

he crossed the line.

Crime scene assumptions, True Detective.

This is gonna happen again.

This is his vision.

Her body is a paraphilic love map.

And he might not have known her but

this idea goes way back with him.

You get that from one of your books?

I did.

I gotta thank Woody Harrelson for this,

he basically says what I'm gonna say anyway.

You got a

chapter in one of those books

on jumping to conclusions?

Any time we start

an investigation with an assumption,

or we come up with a theory...

I guarantee this wasn't his first.

We always have to be ready to abandon that theory.

You're attaching assumption to a piece of evidence,

you start to bend the narrative to support it.

What I like about this clip is that

Woody Harrelson's character

kinda stops him.

Which I got a problem with.

Bone Collector, collection of evidence.

We're gonna need those handcuffs, Amelia.

Well then they can remove them when they get here.

Look in the suitcase.

There's a small saw.

I want you to saw her hands off at the wrist line.

We gotta have those cuffs for prints.

This is not realistic at all.

We would never

destroy the body intentionally like that...

It's true.

To recover hand cuffs.

We would somehow

get those removed.

Saw off her hands.

And she takes a couple seconds

to try to remove 'em, they're stuck,

so the next option is to cut the victim's hands?

I can't.

No.

There's still gonna be blood that's gonna be coming out

of the other end of that hand.

Which is gonna

completely consume whatever DNA or fingerprints

that would be on the hand cuffs so,

not a great option.

Hey, why don't you knock it off, Link?

I don't need to knock it off!

Forensic anthropology, Castle.

Yo.

So this building was set to be demolished,

that is until the salvage crews stripping the place

came across this body.

[Investigator] Buried under concrete no less.

[Kate] Got a cause of death?

Not til I do a full exam,

but he's probably been here since they poured the concrete

back in 1978.

Anything else you can tell us about the victim?

[Investigator] He was maybe early 30s

and a sharp dresser.

Check out that powder blue suit.

In this scene, they're able to somehow miraculously

perfectly excavate this skeleton fully intact.

[Investigator] Buried under concrete no less.

Unlikely.

What?

If you were to be breaking up concrete with

sledge hammers or jack hammer,

you would have already damaged it,

probably crushed a rib cage, if not,

a bunch of the bones.

(gasps)

I know who the victim is.

What?

Beyond that, to give it a general age estimation,

I think that is possible.

[Investigator] He was maybe early 30s.

Your skeleton is going to

age in a very predictable manner.

I am intrigued.

So that what they look for certain growth

and then deterioration of bone.

And the testament to the truly indestructible nature

of polyester.

Early forensic investigations, In Cold Blood.

[Police Officer] Did you find any shell casings?

Nope.

Which means it,

you can bet they didn't leave any fingerprints either.

First off, we can note that they're not wearing

any sort of personal protective equipment.

Nope.

We wouldn't wanna just

take powder and just pour it onto a surface

and then dust that powder around.

Mad men.

We'd take that powder and put it onto a separate

clean surface that's not related to the scene at all.

Stupid.

Other than that, they make an assumption that

casings were cleaned up somehow or picked up.

[Police Officer] Find any shell casings?

Nope.

Could have been a revolver.

Semi-automatic, automatic weapon,

casings can be ejected out of the side of that weapon,

but a revolver, that casing's gonna stay inside.

So that would be the reason why you might not have

a shell casing at the scene.

Probably.

Criminal Minds, crime scene analysis.

Jane Bernie and Vinnia Dev were here.

Jane tried to run, Vinnia didn't.

How do you know?

She's half under her desk,

which means she tried to hide and he ends up found her.

One of the worst things you could do

as a crime scene investigator

is to lose your objectivity.

What if she was just sitting at the desk?

Is that the position she died in?

Maybe she crawled to her desk.

So these three were stabbed

and the rest were shot to death.

They also make an assumption that we have

one unknown subject or killer

as opposed to

two.

Have you considered two killers?

Yes, but the bloody footprints

all seem to come from the same pair of shoes.

It's possible that

someone else didn't stop in blood right?

Yes.

Or that they both wore the same pair of shoes.

We see this a lot.

You would have to recover those shoe wear impressions

and analyze them in the lab,

but just a quick visual analysis

couldn't give you that information.

Evidence at a crime scene, Family Guy.

[TV Announcer] And now, back to Jake and the Fat Man.

Hey, look over here on the carpet.

That's a cigarette butt.

This is probably evidence.

Yeah, well,

can you bring it over to me?

I can't move it, this is a crime scene!

So what we see in here is the

typical chalk outline where the body was.

It's iconic.

Well can you describe it to me?

But it's a joke.

No one does that anymore.

You're destroying evidence.

You could be adding

chalk on top of DNA that could be important

or other trace evidence that could be important.

You know what?

Forget it.

Iron Man 3, the use of virtual reality

in crime scene analysis.

[JARVIS] The heat from the blast was an excessive

3,000 degrees celsius.

Any subjects within 12.5 yards were vaporized instantly.

No bomb parts found in a three mile radius

at a Chinese theater?

[JARIVS] No, sir.

This is something that could happen,

maybe not to that extent that we see

in Iron Man 3 but,

there is current research in the use of

virtual reality

and augmented reality to help assist

crime scene investigators.

Talk to me, happy.

So if we document our scene

with a three dimensional laser scanner,

the laser scanner

is gonna collect millions and millions of

points of data,

and we'd be able to see anything that's

in the view of that scanner.

That.

At the end, we'll wind up with a three dimensional model.

We could then take ourselves virtually through

VR technology

and place ourselves in a scene

to make observations.

And those are the observations that we'd use

for a reconstruction.

Where was evidence?

What's the context of this evidence?

What happened?

And what order did things happen?

There's lots of pageantry going on here,

lots of theater.

Minority Report, predictive crime analysis.

Time horizon, 12 minutes.

Alright, what he's doing now, we call scrubbing the image.

Looking for clues as to where the murder's gonna happen.

Beyond that, the date of the crime,

all we have to run on are the images they produce.

So, in this movie,

we see

our pre-cogs, our psychics

producing images of crimes that haven't happened yet.

The pre-cogs can see a murder four days out.

Now I don't think that

that is ever possible...

Uh-huh.

But there is cutting edge

research and technology

that does help us identify crimes in progress.

Oh this is good.

One of those technologies is what's called

shot spotter.

That identifies

audio from gunshots and specific to gunshots

happening at certain areas

and giving it a GPS locations.

It's a park.

Dutch police are using augmented and virtual reality

to go back and look at crime scenes in the past

to help in their analysis and reconstruction.

[Narrator] Conclusion.

With the increased population of these types of shows,

the public's perception has been affected by it.

Both in positive and negative ways.

On the positive side, we have more people

coming into the field

and more attention's being given to forensic science.

On the negative side,

things are always shown in absolutes.

The timeline of analysis is

not true or not correct.

Techniques and technology that's just not

even scientifically valid

and does not exist.

Now, I understand that

the goal of

this is strictly for entertainment

and it does that.