Forensic science,is the application of a broad spectrum of sciences to answer questions of interest to a legal system!
- Wikipedia
I am addicted to CSI New York,and CSI Miami! I love how they begin from the unknown, and use the known, and available, to solve a crime that was committed without witnesses!
Most times, they are able to do this when the crime scene has not been compromised, and the evidence contaminated!
This is possible only when the police are able to isolate, and insulate, a crime scene!
This preserves the integrity of the crime scene, and makes it possible to piece together available evidence to solve the crime!
Juxtapose this with what happens in a typical crime scene in Nigeria!
On July 27, 2006, Engineer Funso Williams, a notable politician in the firmament of Lagos politics was tied up, and stabbed several times, until he died!
It was a brutal act, and the state government, seeking to show that it had no hand in the death, invited forensic investigators from abroad!
The experts came with their sophisticated equipment, and went to work, they were stunned by what they found! In the room where the man had been stabbed, they found over one thousand fingerprints! How do you process one thousand fingerprints? In frustration, the experts left, and the crime has not been solved till now!
The problem was that when the fellow was stabbed, all manner of sympathisers thronged his house, from old women who sell in the market, to shoe shine boys, all were allowed to go in and see where the dastardly deed was done! In the process, they ruined the crime scene! Members of the public, and even the police, do not know how to treat a crime scene!
After the police headquarters bombing, many "dignitaries" including our president, went to see the crime scene for themselves! Before then, the police had contaminated the crime scene themselves! They moved the gnarled, and mangled, remains of cars, and other debris indiscriminately, in the cause of clearing the place!
When the dignitaries came, they only compounded an already dire situation!
Sometimes, when I see a centrifuge machine used in CSI Miami, to extract the DNA from evidence gathered, or a laser beam to plot the trajectory of a bullet in order to determine the position of the shooter, or to find a bullet slug: I always tell my friends that the Nigerian police do so too! They just look at me with such incredulity, that I end up laughing to betray my intended pun!
We need to educate the public, and the police, on the need to reign in our emotions, and stay away from crime scenes, until they have been reopened to the public by the police!
Until we do this, crimes will remain unsolved, because the perpetrators understand that the public would be on hand to erase their trace once the crime is discovered!
I love Nigeria! I swear!
MAY GOD BLESS NIGERIA!
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