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Forensics: The Real CSI
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Agatha Christie's England
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Today's detectives possess technology that would make Hercule Poirot gasp.
Laser scanners can map a crime scene and create a 3D computer image accurate to the smallest fragment of evidence. DNA analysis can identify an individual from a speck of blood.
Yet police chiefs seem incapable of recognising blatant criminal activity when it happens in full public view. Either they don't see it, or they don't care.
The result is an onslaught of drugs violence that is terrorising every city in Britain. Forensics: The Real CSI (BBC2) set out to show the electronic advances that drive modern policing. Some equipment is so futuristic, it seems like sci-fi.
Forensics: The Real CSI aims to show the advances that drive modern policing. Pictured: Jo Ward
'Three-dimensional point clouds', or laser-generated colour pictures on laptop screens, were detailed to the millimetre. Police could view a location from every angle, surveying it from above or zooming in for a fingertip search.
The tech was stretched to the limit as West Midlands Police investigated a double murder in Dudley. One man was found dead in a suburban street.
Another was rushed to hospital by his brother and nephew, where he died within hours.
Both victims suffered bizarre, triple-edged stab wounds — in the shape, as one copper remarked, of a Mercedes Benz badge. The brother wasn't keen to be interviewed. 'I'm not in the mood, mate,' he told an officer.
The man was one of a family of drugs suppliers. They owned two houses in a residential street.
