Swedish crime scene technicians: facilitations, epistemic frictions and professionalization from the outside

Corinna Kruse

doi:10.1080/2578983x.2019.1627808

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article investigates the role of crime scene technicians in the Swedish criminal justice system, and particularly how Swedish crime scene technicians not only examine crime scenes but also facilitate the criminal justice system’s joint production of forensic evidence. It proposes thinking about the criminal justice system as a conglomeration of epistemic cultures, that is, of communities with different ways of producing and understanding forensic evidence. Such a perspective makes it possible to understand interprofessional frictions as epistemic frictions as well as to draw attention to the facilitations, mediations and translations that crime scene technicians perform. This perspective also makes it possible to illuminate how the crime scene technicians’ professionalization – a professionalization from the outside – affects both their future crime scene work and their facilitations.

Highlights

The interactions between different actors in a criminal justice system are of great criminological interest: It is through these interactions that criminal justice is achieved in practice
This article investigates the role of crime scene technicians in the Swedish criminal justice system, and how Swedish crime scene technicians examine crime scenes and facilitate the criminal justice system’s joint production of forensic evidence
It proposes thinking about the criminal justice system as a conglomeration of epistemic cultures, that is, of communities with different ways of producing and understanding forensic evidence

Summary

Introduction

The interactions between different actors in a criminal justice system are of great criminological interest: It is through these interactions that criminal justice is achieved in practice. Through the lens of their formal training, I focus on how crime scene technicians as a profession facilitate the criminal justice system’s joint production of forensic evidence. Seeing the criminal justice system as a conglomeration of such epistemic cultures, with different understandings of and perspectives on the production of forensic evidence, allows a different view on both crime scene technicians’ work, their professionalization from the outside (cf Evetts, 2013; Wilson-Kovacs, 2014), and the criminal justice system and its production of forensic evidence as a whole. Many work in several such positions before coming to a crime scene division There, they will work alongside their more senior colleagues for about a year, before going to the National Forensic Centre (NFC; the Swedish state-run forensic laboratory) for formal training. Julian and Robertson (2011) for example, list professionalism, communication and outlook on life among key attributes, and Kelty (2011) proposes guidelines for using these attributes in recruitment. Wilson-Kovacs (2014) discusses how the British crime scene examiners’ position in the criminal justice system and their professionalization from the outside affect their self-image

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