“A real crime scene can be quite confronting. It’s the bloodstains on the walls. It’s the real person that lay deceased within the scene.”
Shawn Harkins is a forensic lecturer at the Canberra Institute of Technology. He spends his days with his students, but by night can often be found playing the role of both perpetrator and victim, creating a crime scene for his students to analyse.
“The narratives aren't based necessarily on real life,” he told The Feed, “but they’re the type of bloodstains that we see in real life. They have to be. I need to prepare these trainee crime scenes as best I can”.
The next day, Charlotte Weldon and Erin Bourke, both second year students, enter the ‘crime scene’ and begin examining, collecting measurements and calculations. They’ll take the data they extract to come up with a theory for the crime.
“It's my expectation that they're able to reconstruct the scene, reconstruct who was in the scene, and reconstruct how it was that the crime took place,” said Paul.
Source: The Feed
“The process is breaking it down so it’s not so overwhelming,” said Erin. “Start with the floor, work your way around the walls”.
YYY remembers her first crime scene. “I was a little bit scared,” she said. I had no idea where to begin, what to even think.
“I was just scrambled – you kind of freeze for a second”.
Despite being inspired to follow this career path because of a love of CSI Las Vegas, ZZZ quickly learned that realism isn’t the highest priority for TV writers.
“Definitely the whole contamination issue,” she said. “You don’t see them wearing all of this on TV”.
Paul agrees. “Walking around with a $2000 Armani suit is certainly not going to be the most effective way to examine the crime scene.”
