Super Baby Album

Posts Tagged ‘kathleen garza murder’

If you are an avid fan of the CSI TV shows, you may have heard of terms such as forensic fingerprint examiner and wondered what they are and what they do.

In this article, I will explain what a forensic fingerprint examiner is and describe what they do.

In many crime labs, fingerprint examiners are a crucial part of a criminal investigation. If you get a job in this field, it is your responsibility to make comparisons between fingerprint evidence gathered from crime scenes with similar evidence collected from suspects and from big databases. You also make trips to crime scenes and help out with exposing, photographing, and lifting fingerprints. In order to do these, you must be familiar with all the light and chemical techniques for exposing latent fingerprints and all the methods for protecting and gathering them.

To obtain a job in the field of a fingerprint examiner, the candidate must possess a bachelor’s degree with additional coursework or experience in fingerprint analysis. There are, however, some employers who will hire you if you have only a high school diploma or GED and you have taken a few college level classes in biology, chemistry, or math. Check with your potential employer to determine the exact requirements. If college is not your cup of tea, then plan on working for several years before climbing up the corporate ladder.

For that reason, it is best to attend college and take coursework in the forensic science curriculum. You will have a better chance of landing a job as a fingerprint examiner with your college degree over somebody who never even went to college.

Having a firm grasp of forensics can help bring a perpetrator to justice and bring closure to his victims or their families.  For this reason, there will always be a demand for a forensics expert.

If you are an avid fan of the CSI TV shows, you may have heard of terms such as criminalists and wondered what they are and what they do.

In this article, I will attempt to define what a criminalist is and explain what their job description entails.

The term criminalist is a modernized umbrella term that encompasses workers in many aspects in forensics such as biology, botany, entomology, or one of the laboratory sciences such as chemistry. Nowadays, many schools offer classes in forensic science. Students of forensic science curriculums undergo coursework in biology, chemistry, microbiology, physics, mathematics, pharmacology, and many other scientific areas. Upon receipt of your degree, you can go out and apply for a job in any forensics lab. To get a job as a basic criminal scientist, it is not required that you have a college degree since most of your knowledge will be derived from on-the-job experience.

If you wish to become an expert in a specific area, it is required that you take courses in postgraduate education. For instance, if you want to become an expert in firearms, it is best to get postgraduate education in the field and then apply for a job. If you are not much into getting a higher level education, the other alternative is to work in the firearms department of a crime lab for at least one to two years. After gaining experience in the forensics firearms lab, only then can you obtain a job as a firearms examiner. Please note that somebody with the higher level college education combined with his on-the-job experience attracts more attention on the part of the employer than somebody with only a bachelor’s degree and the same amount of on-the-job experience.

Employers of forensics laboratories value a college education on the part of the applicant. They view the college graduate as someone who is more credible to give testimony on the witness stand when he reports his findings to a judge and jury and helps bring an offender to justice.