TV Crime Drama—the 'CSI Effect' Again and Again

by Andrea Campbell

I’ve been talking about the differences between TV crime drama and reality for about five years now. I’ve even given programs about the subject for mystery and crime novel writers with a presentation I call "The CSI Effect: 7 Key Differences between TV Crime Drama and Reality."

The live program is fun because I bring along personal protection equipment and have an audience member “suit up” while I’m talking. And of course it is a Tyvek HAZMAT type outfit; and then we compare it to what the chicks on the CSI shows are wearing.

This week I got a press release that some researchers at the Mayo Clinic who compared CSI and CSI: Miami to actual U. S. homicide data. No surprise, they discovered clear differences. Timothy Lineberry, M.D., a psychiatrist at Mayo Clinic, says, “We make a lot of our decisions as a society based on information that we have, and television has been used to provide public health messages.”

Those two particular shows, CSI and CSI: Miami, were used because of their enormous viewing audience, somewhere around 43 million viewers every year. Mainly the Mayo Clinic investigators used the Center for Disease Control’s National Violent Death Reporting System to compare data with the television portrayals. They discovered the biggest discrepancies involved relationships, alcohol, and race where characterizations of perpetrators and victims were concerned.

Apparently, actual statistics say that drugs and alcohol affect both victim and offender at the time of the crime in reality—and that was one of the differences from what the TV shows portray. The other main difference they found was regarding what race was more likely to be involved and on the television shows primarily they used Caucasians who did not know their attackers. In real life, however, whites are not the majority of offenders and, often, real victims know or were intimately involved with their attackers in the past.

"If we believe that there is a lack of association with alcohol, that strangers are more likely to attack, and that homicide doesn’t represent particular groups of people, it’s difficult to create public health interventions that the general public supports. We make a lot of our decisions as a society based on information that we have, and television has been used to provide public health messages." — Dr. Lineberry

I have a Web site blog called The CSI Effect, which I gave up writing about for lack of interest. I’ve written about these differences and have been trying to sell a book proposal on another Web site (for about four years now), not only about these very specific topics, but about the ramifications of how these misconceptions are perpetrated on the public and how they enter into real life—in the courtroom.

For example, years ago when people did not know as much about forensics they were little concerned about what types of evidence were brought into court and how they were collected. One could say that in the “old days,” the prosecutors took advantage of that notion at every turn. Obviously, we know now that the landscape has changed. Juries are more inclined to ask about a lack of evidence but, they also are more misinformed in many instances and take an unrealistic stance—such as expecting DNA evidence for car thefts—when that was never being done.

So the game has been upped. And in my last two articles, we’ve been talking about the recent denigrating reports from the National Academy of Sciences on behalf of Congress about forensic science and how the researchers found the industry lacking. It's not good, we know.

But the TV producers do do those things; take more than poetic license with drama: portray white, rich, good-looking victims—because they need the show to sell to advertisers and if we saw the real low level of most crime, we’d change the channel—not sexy or appealing enough.

So television will continue to push the entertainment envelope away from reality. Reality sucks. Ask any detective. If he has the time to talk to you. Now that we’ve ferreted out these discrepancies yet again—it’s getting real old for me as a topic—let’s support science, give the labs the manpower and funds they need, educate the juries better, and kick some criminal ass.

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Separating Fact from Fiction

by Andrea Campbell

Do you remember the television show "Qunicy, M.E."? It was a long time ago and I’d say that forensic science and crime-scene drama on television has increased twenty-fold since then. Even the primetime shows such as 20/20, Primetime, and 48 Hours have gone to the crime drama format. And for good reason: we love a mystery, we love to see stories about desperate people, and we love to see some kind of resolution. The problem lies mainly with the last element, the resolution part. Since everything on the “tube” (or should I say flat screen now?) is wrapped up in these neat, 30-60-90 minute formats (not counting commercial breaks), it gives the impression that things went smoothly from discovery, to arrest, and subsequently to conviction. Wow! if only real-life crime and cases were that condensed, we’d have to think about other things, like crime prevention (a not-so-novel idea that gets short-shrift).

I give a talk called The CSI Effect: 7 Key Differences Between TV Crime Drama and Reality. It’s amusing and I even bring props, but the scary thing is, it’s true stuff. For time’s sake and word count in this article today, we’ll take just one element I address: manpower. Television, for the sake of simplicity, has taken the jobs of twenty or more real-life criminologists and law enforcement, and rolled them into a small cast of easily-recognizable characters, maybe four or five. Okay, if you are in Podunk hill country with a population of 900, you probably know all the characters you’re going to meet at a crime scene. Get into the average, medium-sized city, however, and there is a crowd! For starters, you’ve got the “first responders,” the patrolmen of the local police department who are dispatched to the scene because of a 911 call, when a citizen discovers a body. (Outdoors it could be a hunter, berry-picker or just someone in recreation.)

The police cordon off the area, and detectives (from the police department), and the M.E. or coroner will be alerted to show up. (The difference between a medical examiner and a coroner are: 1) education - the M.E. is a doctor of pathology; 2) appointment vs. election - the coroner is an elected position and political in nature; and 3) jurisdiction - they can both pronounce death but if the manner is a suspicious death such as a homicide, suicide, or undetermined, the examination of the body at the morgue is generally done by a medically trained pathologist conducting an "autopsy.") Now most times a city has officers who are trained to collect evidence. They are called crime-scene techs, or criminalists, or any number of outfit names like CSU, crime-scene investigators, etc. Their job is to photograph the scene, collect evidence properly, and preserve chain of custody between the scene and the lab.

At the laboratory (in Arkansas we have a state crime lab), the evidence is brought in and given to lab evidence technicians at Intake, who log-in the materials, make sure the paperwork is sacrosanct, and then later, funnel it to the correct department for scientific analysis. All the while this is going on, the detectives are looking up information for identification purposes, notifying the families, conducting interviews, checking on reports and canvassing the neighborhood, if necessary, for witnesses, etc. Whew! A lot of things swirling around and many people have been linked to the scene per their own special job.

Why, if we count only those I’ve mentioned thus far, we could have between 10 to 12 people, and the evidence hasn't even begun to be processed forensically! Okay, so I’m running out of column inch here, but suffice it to say, that upwards of 20 to 30 people can eventually have touched this case in the capacity of their jobs—and the phones haven’t been silent this whole time because crime doesn’t wait for the first case to be finished. I know you get it, it’s just not something everyone thinks about when they consider the realities of working on a homicide, rape case, or other serious felony. So there’s something to think about when you watch TV.

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