Skip to Navigation
University of Pittsburgh
Print This Page Print this pages

September 25, 2008

CSI: Bradford Campus Unit

BRADFORD — The students in criminal justice professor Tony Gaskew’s Crime Scene Investigation I class exchange their backpacks for safety goggles and bright purple latex gloves as they await his introduction to the day’s work in the lab of Pitt Bradford’s brand-new crime scene investigation (CSI) house.

They know they’ll be assigned a new case to investigate. Beyond that, Gaskew gives them little to go on. His explanation is brief: The police have received a call from a family member who entered the house at 31 Taylor Drive, smelled a terrible odor and didn’t want to go any further, he tells them. “That’s it,” he says when pressed for more detail.

Nervously clutching cameras, notepads and miniature tape recorders, they exit the lab and gather on the front lawn of the red ranch house. Although an interior door connects the lab to the crime scene, the student investigators enter UPB’s CSI house only through the front door, just as they would if they were professionals answering a real call.

The class of 15 students, mostly juniors and seniors, is divided into teams, each with a team leader, a case agent and other members assigned to various tasks within the investigation.

As the students prepare to enter the home, Gaskew remains in the lab, donning headphones and settling in behind a control panel with multiple screens that allows him to watch, listen and speak to the students as they put into practice the CSI techniques they’ve been taught.

The three-bedroom ranch that sits at the edge of the campus once housed UPB’s psychology department, but has been renovated and equipped at a cost of upwards of $100,000 to open this term as a state-of-the art CSI house — part of a strategic plan to turn criminal justice into a flagship program for the campus.

The University’s Pittsburgh campus offers a four-year administration of justice program and Pitt-Greensburg offers a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice. But UPB’s is the only Pitt program in which students can conduct hands-on investigations in an on-campus CSI house.

With 78 full-time students, criminal justice is among UPB’s largest majors. Campus President Livingston Alexander said the program is on an upward trajectory. “I see nothing but growing enthusiasm and a magnet for students,” he said.

UPB’s criminal justice program was among seven majors “targeted for prominence” in the campus’s 2004-09 strategic plan and allocated additional resources to enable them to grow, Alexander said.

The CSI house, which Gaskew was recruited to develop, was “precisely in sync with our ambition to make the criminal justice program one of the best in the region,” Alexander said. “It was exactly what we would need to strengthen criminal justice as one of the prominent programs on our campus.” Gaskew joined UPB’s criminal justice program director Bernie Meyer on the faculty three years ago and spent two years developing the CSI house in conjunction with a consultant.

In the CSI house lab, Bradford students can practice lifting fingerprint evidence — even from inside rubber gloves — or use microscopes to examine hair, fiber and ballistic evidence.

Each room in the CSI house is equipped with a fixed camera as well as one that can pan 360 degrees and zoom in close enough to see individual fibers or read the serial number on a shell casing.

The students’ investigations are recorded for viewing later to allow Gaskew to show the class exactly what they did well — or not so well.

A certified police academy instructor who has military and law enforcement experience in addition to master’s and doctoral degrees in criminal justice, Gaskew said he “could never have dreamed to have this in undergraduate work.”

UPB’s equipment, Gaskew said, “rivals any crime scene lab in the state,” even exceeding the facilities of many professional law enforcement agencies.

Penn State and West Virginia University are among the few universities nearby with CSI houses, and only a handful of universities nationwide have them. But soon they will be a must, Gaskew said.

“This is the future of criminal justice programs in the country,” Gaskew said. “How can you not have one and produce the same caliber of professionals?”

The simple advantage of being exposed to the equipment professionals use in the field is a tremendous plus when students enter the workforce, Gaskew said, adding that degree programs that offer students such hands-on experience “bridge the gap between academic and practical law enforcement.”

Hesitant at first, the student team chosen to enter the house first scopes out the yard. When they search inside, they find a triple homicide: a dead woman in the kitchen, a dead man in the bedroom and a dead infant in a crib. While the victims are just mannequins, there are bullet holes in their clothing and the pools of blood surrounding them are real.

Later Gaskew chastises students for the time they wasted before entering the house to ascertain whether a crime had been committed; the delay might have allowed the afternoon’s intermittent drizzle to destroy biological evidence outside the house. However, he praises their dedication to thoroughness as he explains to visitors what the students inside the house are doing. “It’s a very complicated crime scene; they’re taking their time,” Gaskew points out as he watches.

Students quickly note they’ve found two types of shell casings — a clue that two weapons, and therefore possibly two shooters, were involved. Elsewhere they find a bag of suspected marijuana — were these drug-related killings? — and an unlocked window that was the likely point of escape for whomever did the shooting.

Once the teams have had the opportunity to conduct their walkthroughs, Gaskew suspends their investigation long enough to call the entire class into the kitchen for a demonstration on conducting a field test for blood.

“Every homicide investigator in the country is going to run a field test,” he says, as he shows the students how to use a Hemident test on a swab of suspected blood. When the swab is mixed with chemical reagents inside a tube, the presence of blood turns the fluid bluish-green. If it’s positive, “you know you have a homicide,” he explains as he holds up the tube that indeed has changed color.

The CSI students, who have spent the past two weeks working on a drug trafficking case, will have a month to process this murder scene.

Over the 15-week term, the students will be assigned eight crime scenes including robbery, burglary, drug trafficking and homicide. Those who go on to an advanced course next term will encounter such crimes as sexual assault-homicide, child abduction, murder-suicide and extortion, Gaskew said. The cases, which can take Gaskew days to set up inside the CSI house, are based on his own experience as a criminal investigator.

The methodology — tossing students sink-or-swim into a case where they’ll be required to work as a team and to demonstrate their ability to use what they’ve learned in the classroom — is the same as in police academy training, Gaskew said, adding it’s also akin to the experience a student of French or Spanish has when he or she goes abroad to study the language. “This is ethnographic field work for criminal justice,” he said.

Those who come in thinking the course will be like the TV crime drama “CSI” instead may find it more akin to “Survivor.” The students are thrown into a situation in which they’re forced to get along and finish cases whether or not they’ve clashed with a teammate or have had a bad day. “They’re thrown into this dynamic immediately, and they adjust very quickly,” Gaskew said.

In addition to individual reports and sketches, for each case the teams must turn in a casebook containing all the documentation and paperwork on their investigation.

Just as they’ll find if they pursue careers as investigators, there’s plenty of paperwork. Investigation reports must be written. Evidence must be collected and recorded and the chain of possession documented. Requests for search warrants must be prepared for presentation (sometimes to a real judge, other times to “Judge” Gaskew) and if probable cause isn’t established, the team could be denied further access to the scene and their investigation could fall flat.

“Students do a fantastic job at this,” Gaskew said. “They know it’s business and are very serious.”

The students’ dedication is apparent: The 3-credit CSI class is scheduled as a three-hour weekly lab, with students required concurrently to take another 3-credit criminal evidence/investigation course that meets for 50 minutes three times a week. In this particular week, since students knew a new case was being introduced, they chose to meet every day, Gaskew said.

Today, while some students leave at the end of class, others opt to continue working. Gaskew watches on screen as two students stay long after the class has ended, walking through the house slowly as they brainstorm, compare notes and formulate theories on what happened at the crime scene, how it happened and why.

“This is how cases get solved,” Gaskew said, noting that professional investigators often spend hours at a scene after other officers have left, threading together bits and pieces of what they’ve discovered as they try to solve a crime.

The science part, Gaskew said, is automatic. What’s tougher, he said, is the theory part.

More than merely using what they’ve studied in earlier forensic science coursework, students also put into practice what they’ve learned in classes from communication to the sciences. “It incorporates critical thinking, biology, chemistry, math and geometry,” Gaskew said.

Similar to students in a clinical rotation in nursing, for example, students are put under pressure to use what they’ve learned.

Gaskew said the majority of crime cases that go unsolved occur because the investigator made a human error. Allowing the students to perfect their skills and make mistakes in a safe setting, he hopes, will reduce the chances for errors when his students become professionals in the field.

“They’ve been studying this, now they have to apply it,” Gaskew said. “They’re stressed,” he said. “‘Am I going to be the one who messes up?’ ‘Am I going to be the one who solves it?’”

Additionally, students learn to put into practice interpersonal and leadership skills. His team leaders often are very skilled, but may also be, as he puts it, “challenged in delegating.” Put under the time pressure of too much work for one person to handle, they learn to share the responsibilities of the case and operate as a team. “A lot of them are finding out what criminal investigators have learned for years,” he said. “This is a process. … They understand only as teams are they going to solve this.”

Because of prerequisite requirements, all the current CSI students are criminal justice majors. But interest is growing among non-majors who want to take the class.

And more than half of them are female. “Bigger, stronger, faster doesn’t make the better investigator,” said Gaskew. “You beat them with your mind.”

Gaskew said he welcomes the addition of a wider variety of students to the course, adding that some students in journalism, broadcasting, engineering and pre-law are among those who’ve expressed interest. “It’s fantastic with me,” he said, adding that he looks forward to the opportunity to push the close-knit group of criminal justice majors to interact in class with students from beyond that microcosm.

Part of what is learned in the class goes beyond police work, he said, which is valuable to students regardless of their career path. “I get to see students perfect not investigation skills but critical thinking skills and leave the class as better students, not better criminal justice students.”

—Kimberly K. Barlow

Filed under: Feature,Volume 41 Issue 3

Leave a Reply