Crime Lab

As you know, I have a part-time job as a Technical Writer and Quality Assurance Analyst at the Rhode Island State Crime Lab. I really like my job. The people are cool, the work is both fascinating and ghoulish, and I'm learning a lot. I made the mistake today, however, of perusing a book about how to investigate homicides. I would never dream of burdening anyone with some of the horrors of what I saw today in that book. But I can assure you that, being a very visual person, I can't imagine that those images are going to leave me any time soon.

But because I work with cool people, I got to talk about what I saw. This is all new for me. I like science, and was even an Environmental Studies major briefly. But even at its ickiest, biology doesn't have sex crimes.

I was a bit rattled. But because I am, at heart, a media and culture junkie, I transferred my own existential issues about violent deaths onto our culture, which finds ENTERTAINMENT in franchise shows like "Law and Order" and "CSI". We love crime and punishment. And it's kind of weird. People are often so impressed to hear I work at the Crime Lab, and I always respond "It's not sexy like CSI."

And there's that word again. Sex. Ok, so do we find it "sexy" and "entertaining" to watch these shows because we don't have real danger in our society? Yes, there are problems here, but compare the US to a country like, say, Kenya in the past couple weeks. So our biggest random threat is a pervert serial killer, not rioting after a Presidential election that was probably rigged. Not unlike what happened here in the US in 2004, I might add. But I digress.

Here's the difference though, between television's idea of cops and robbers, and what I'm starting to see. On those shows, the fingerprints are always perfect, the bullets always match the gun, and the bad guys are always caught. The truth of the matter is that they just are not. My valiant and intrepid co-workers do top-notch work, so that's not the problem. Truth is, the fingerprints are blurry if they're there at all, and there are a whole lot of guns out there that none of us know about.

But the way it's presented in our "entertainment", good always truimphs over evil. We win. And winning is sexy. So I'm starting to get it. It's the same old story, but these days we're not afraid of Germans or Communists, and it's not politically correct to be afraid of other cultures anymore anyway. So instead, we're afraid of ourselves; of the deepest, darkest, ugliest, and most twisted recesses that might just exist in all of us.

And I'm sorry to report that I'm starting to learn that we really kind of should be.