A forensics expert explains what baffles him about NCIS. Following its CBS debut in 2003, NCIS quickly became a staple of procedural network television shows, especially when it came to criminal investigation series.
In an interview with Rachel Foertsch for ScreenRant, forensics expert and New York Police Department Detective Matt Steiner clarifies the role that forensics plays in a criminal investigation. He explains the fundamental difference between the detective and forensics sides of an investigation that is overlooked in shows like NCIS.
Steiner also emphasizes that cases are rarely concluded as easily as they are in NCIS, and most criminal investigators do not follow a case all the way through as they do in the long-running series. Check out Steiner’s comments below:
Matt Steiner: So you have two sides of the investigation. You have the detectives that deal more and they care more about the motive. They are interviewing people, they’re interrogating people, they’re dealing with more of the testimonial evidence, what people are saying. And then the forensic side is dealing strictly with the evidence, we just care about the evidence. And then, for a good investigation, you compare the two. It’s like, “Evidence tells me this, my suspect tells me this. Does it agree with it or doesn’t? Is my evidence telling me that this person is lying?” And if so, then you have a strong theory and then that’s what you want to bring to court. But it’s the same thing, that evidence could be like, “All right, yeah, it’s possible what this person is saying, and we can’t disprove ’em.” That’s why they say “the evidence doesn’t lie.” It’s because it doesn’t, its interpretation could be wrong, but the evidence itself is not going to lie.
ScreenRant: Well, obviously in shows, too, it opens with we have a case, we need to solve it, and it closes with case solved. How often do you actually find a conclusion to a case that you’re working on? I can’t imagine that it’s that easy.
Matt Steiner: No, it isn’t that easy. And conclusions are always at the end of trials, and not everything goes to trial, but just because someone gets arrested for something doesn’t mean that they’re guilty of it. Sometimes, the evidence that we collect can exonerate somebody, as well. So, there’s that part of it. And the other part is for a crime scene investigator, you always get what they call the cliff notes version of the case. You’re getting a beginning part of the story. You’re not doing any of the interviews, you’re not talking to the family, you’re not talking to victims or anything like that. You’re just doing your job at the crime scene. And then you move on to the next one. Next day you go to a different crime scene, and it’s not usually until years later when it goes to trial, you find out what happened with it.
And sometimes that initial story is very different. At the end, they may have a suspect in the beginning, they could be telling you at the crime scene, “Oh, we think it’s the husband,” and then at the end, it wasn’t the husband, it was a boyfriend that we didn’t know about, or something like that. So, you don’t follow the whole case all the way through. So unless, maybe, if you work in a small jurisdiction, where you’re constantly embedded with other investigators, you may know what’s going on, but most places, and certainly busy places, you’re just going from one crime scene to the next crime scene to the next crime scene.
ScreenRant: Oh, see, okay. Because the show almost always ends with someone confessing and then them being taken away. And then it’s like, okay, we assume that they’re in jail, and that’s it. Case closed.
Matt Steiner: That can happen sometimes. I would say a lot of times, at least in New York City, we never knew the results until later on, until we’re being called to trial. If it’s an active scene, and they have a suspect right away, and then they make an arrest, and then you do a subsequent crime scene run to an apartment where they find more evidence, then maybe you kind of know more about the stories. Now, there was a shooting scene and now in the suspect’s apartment, we found the gun, and then they match the gun. And that, in your mind, you’re like, “Case closed.” But still, you don’t know the conclusions of anything until it’s been adjudicated.
