Starting from 2000, the first season of CSI:
Crime Scene Investigation debuted on TV and soon became one of the most
popular “procedural” (i.e. describing the police/investigation
procedures) series in the world. Similar series, including its spin-offs (CSI:Miami and CSI:NY) but also the various NCIS, Bones, and so
on, have followed in its footsteps almost always repeating the same success.
They have allowed to bring
the public closer to a previously little known aspect of the investigation
of crimes, even if within written fiction it had already begun to carve out an
important position (for instance the novels in the series of Dr Kay Scarpetta written by Patricia
Cornwell, although the perspective was slightly different), namely that of
the meticulous forensics work based on physical evidence and analysis,
as opposed to the classic investigation made mostly of intuition.
The success of these
series has, however, given rise to a phenomenon that has still negative
consequences in the field of the real forensic science, or rather of its
application in the legal field. This phenomenon is called “CSI Effect”.
It is due to the fact
that what these series show is mostly fiction, even if there is some
reality. The viewer (or the reader in the case of the novels), who isn’t an
expert in the field, is often unable to distinguish fiction from reality and
that generates expectations regarding the work of real forensic
investigators, in relation to actual crimes, that are anything but
realistic.
In the various CSI
series and the like, for example, we see that all cases are solved thanks to
the discovery of physical evidence that is irrefutable to link a suspect
to the crime scene and then identify them as the culprit.
Beside the fact that in
reality the physical proofs that can be used are often very few and difficult
to interpret, it is rarely highlighted that just a few of them are to be
considered really relevant from a legal point of view. This category
includes those that can be 100% (or almost) traced back to a single person. In
other words, the only irrefutable physical evidence is a DNA match (which
has an error rate practically equal to zero, unless you have to do with
identical twins) and the dear old fingerprints. But even the latter have
led to sensational errors, since the identification may present a not entirely
negligible percentage of uncertainty.
Then you must consider
that finding identifiable fingerprints is not nearly as common as it seems,
while in almost all cases there isn’t the slightest trace of DNA.
All other physical
evidence often proves absolutely nothing. When in the TV series we
see criminologists get to a suspect by a small fibre, with the support of a
mysterious (and even a little science fiction-like) database, and how
this leads to their arrest and presumably to their conviction, well, in those
cases fiction prevails.
This physical evidence
in reality can be traced to a certain person with very low likelihood,
because there are a number of factors why for example the fibre I mentioned
before can come from many different objects and especially can be transmitted
entirely by accident, through a chain of individuals, to the crime scene.
In a nutshell, in the
real world it may easily happen that, in a case where there is a lot of
non-relevant physical evidence (so no fingerprints and no DNA), this is
by no means sufficient to convict someone. On the contrary, it may happen
that there is a sentence based on a whole series of proofs that do not
include any physical evidence.
Yet people watching
these TV series has the false perception that this cannot, and indeed
should, never happen.
This false perception,
which is actually called “CSI Effect”, is the source of so many
conflicting opinions from the media and the public about famous crimes,
but also poses a big risk in situations where it arises in those who have the
task of judging in the context of these crimes and are at the same time common
people. I’m talking about jurors.
Jurors are people who do not always have the scientific
background to really understand forensic science or the probability related
to it, and this fact has led in some cases to judicial errors. In fact,
it has happened that innocents were convicted because jurors had given too
much importance to physical evidence with a low relevance, just as the
classical fibre on the body of the victim who had vaguely to do with the
suspect. In others the opposite happened: a culprit was acquitted because
there was no physical evidence that gave the “certainty” of their involvement, although there were a thousand
other facts or clues that gave rise to very few doubts (like motive,
opportunity, and even eyewitnesses).
I heard for the first
time of the “CSI Effect”, which is being studied since 2006, during an
online course in criminology from the University of Leicester that I attended at the beginning of 2014, and I
realised that I’m not free from it either.
I am a huge fan
of these TV series (and also of Cornwell’s novels) and, even if I am fully
aware that at least 60% of what I see (or read) is totally unreal (can
you recall the typical DNA identification made in five minutes?), I was often
pushed to think that the work of the forensic squad was really central,
indeed indispensable in solving a crime (especially in murders).
This thought is so
rooted in ordinary people who love mysteries and thrillers that they
expect to see it in movies, TV series, and novels.
And we, thriller
authors, end up giving them what they want, because what we write is not
and should not be reality, but is fiction. You must not forget that.
Some of us try to be as
realistic as possible and others, instead, move considerably away from what
happens in the real world, but virtually all the authors of these genres
bend reality to the needs of the story, so that the latter works
and, in the meantime, the suspension of disbelief is maintained, which
often has nothing to do with reality but only with its perception. Because,
let’s face it, reality rarely fits the times and ways of narrating stories,
or otherwise it can sometimes become boring for the reader who has specific
expectations within a genre. Even when we write true stories, we end up
novelising them so that they work.
I admit I did too with
“The Mentor”, indeed I did it in a very strong way.
In the end, the only
reality in it is London and its streets (some details of which are completely accurate, because
I visited almost all of those streets in person) and some very general
information about the organisation of the police (like the separation
between the Metropolitan Police and the City of London Police). Concerning the rest, I took full licence.
In addition to assume
that the employees of the forensic department at Scotland Yard are policemen
(in the UK there is often a significant separation between the police, the
investigators who work on the crime scenes, and the technicians who analyse the
findings) and show a continuous and direct cooperation between them and a
Murder Investigation Team, or making them use guns with too much ease - all
essential devices to tell the story the way I wanted to (in this regard I wrote
a note at the beginning of the book ) -, in my novel you can find clear
traces of the “CSI Effect”.
On one occasion, for
example, the main character, Detective Eric Shaw, manages to nail the
culprit with anything but crystal clear physical evidence. In another,
on the contrary, a myriad of clues together with the absence of a solid
alibi does not seem sufficient to hold a suspect in custody even for a
minute longer, because there is no physical evidence.
All this was done in
order to bring the story in a certain direction that in the real world
would never have occurred. But, remember, we’re always talking about fiction
, so not only I could, indeed I had to do that. The important thing
is to be consistent when you do it.
Here I enjoyed making
both situations quite plausible, with explanations that are in line with
the suspension of disbelief, so that, although these are a bit of a stretch, so
far no one has perceived them as such (at least nobody told me they had),
partly because of the way I presented them, but mainly because any reader of
thrillers and mysteries is a victim of the “CSI Effect”, too.
And, although they are aware
of it, after all, they like to think that justice is made of white and
black, of incontestable evidence without which you don’t go to jail, that
it is more likely that the culprit is caught rather than an innocent pay for a
crime they didn’t commit. All this is reassuring against a real world
made of incomprehensible statistics, uncertainties about the guilt,
miscarriages of justice, approximate investigations and more, that we don’t
like and that certainly don’t entertain us as, instead, fiction does. “Crime
fiction” in all its facets is and should be entertainment. Let’s
leave reality to documentaries and non-fiction.
No comments:
Post a Comment