Abstract
This article explores the articulation of a novel forensic object—the ‘crime scene’—and its corresponding expert—the investigating officer. Through a detailed engagement with the work of the late nineteenth-century Austrian jurist and criminalist Hans Gross, it analyses the dynamic and reflexive nature of this model of ‘CSI’, emphasising the material, physical, psychological and instrumental means through which the crime scene as a delineated space, and its investigator as a disciplined agent operating within it, jointly came into being. It has a further, historiographic, aim: to move away from the commonplace emphasis in histories of forensics on fin-de-siècle criminology and toward its comparatively under-explored contemporary, criminalistics. In so doing, it opens up new ways of thinking about the crime scene as a defining feature of our present-day forensic culture that recognise its historical contingency and the complex processes at work in its creation and development.
Highlights
One is historical: to explore the latenineteenth century roots of what has become a defining feature of our present-day forensic culture—the crime scene as a distinct domain of investigation and analysis. We will do this through a detailed engagement with one historical actor, the Austrian jurist and magistrate Hans Gross, and one of his books, Handbuch für untersuchungsrichter als system der kriminalistik (1893, translated as Criminal Investigation: A Practical Handbook in 1906)
The other, with which we begin, is historiographical: to use this account of ‘Grossian’ crime scene investigation to show the value of shifting attention away from the much studied case of fin-de-siècle criminology and onto its comparatively underexplored contemporary, criminalistics
In this article we have examined the late nineteenth-century origins of crime scene investigation as developed by Hans Gross
Summary
In recent decades historians such as Neil Davie, Mary Gibson, Robert Nye, Daniel Pick and Richard Wetzell have provided sophisticated accounts of the disciplinary formation of criminology and its core object of concern, the criminal body. Becker places Gross as part of a generation of German-speaking police and law reformers in the second half of the nineteenth century whose main aim was to set the modern investigation and prosecution of crime on a standardised, objective footing They attempted this in large part by modelling their practices on the contemporary physical and natural sciences, whose characteristics Becker derives in large measure from Daston and Galison’s classic work on the interlaced cognitive, technical and emotional disciplines associated with an emergent regime of ‘mechanical objectivity’.11. Excrement left at crime scenes, to take a striking example, has at the same time an anthropological dimension (a superstitious practice of certain criminal ‘tribes’) and one relevant to crime scene analysis: excrement can be examined for its constitutive physical traces (seeds, parasites, e.g.) that may link it to its human source. It is to this latter version of crime scene trace—and to the conditions for its effective investigation—that our discussion turns
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