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Round-up: A Lot of CSI-Style Forensics Have Turned Out to be Bogus

Basically a lot of it is pseudoscience that was never rigorously tested in controlled situations to see if it actually worked.

This is because it was not developed by scientists, but by police, and mainly with an interest in putting people in prison rather than uncovering the truth.

Here are a few more articles on how unreliable modern forensics are.

Unfortunately due to TV shows that stress forensic investigation, juries are demanding this kind of evidence at trial, and have little idea of how untested and unreliable it really is.

HEY REMEMBER WHEN I WROTE ABOUT THIS TWO YEARS AGO? SPECIFICALLY THE PART ABOUT FBI REVIEWING ITS FORENSICS HAIR ANALYSIS CASES? WELL THE RESULTS ARE IN AND WHOOPS: EVEN THE FBI ADMITS THAT IT’S BOGUS NOW

In case you are stopped by the paywall here’s a Slate article on the same thing and here’s another one. 

Hair analysis alone has been used in thousands of trials. The FBI is reviewing 2500 cases out of “21000 federal and state requests to the FBI’s hair-comparison unit between 1972 and 1999″. Even if this review exonerates some of those convictions, that doesn’t even begin to cover the hundreds of state and local “experts” trained by the FBI in this bogus “hair analysis” technique to do things like this:

So anyway remember anytime you hear about “forensic evidence” that a lot of it is bullcrap and not scientifically validated and a lot of so-called experts are just pulling conclusions out of their ass.

the forensic hair analysis thing is terrible, the FBI literally invented a branch of forensic psuedoscience with no evidence behind it in order to boost conviction rates, then taught the bogus technique to thousands of forensic investigators in the us and around the world. we have no idea how many people have been wrongfully convicted, and this is just one in a very long list of forensic techniques that lack rigorous scientific evaluation

It’s been another year or two so here’s an extremely recent article about how “Criminal Profiling” is totally bogus and TV shows like Mindhunters continue to focus on it because it looks cool and makes good stories, but it really only works in the movies. 

Profiling was trendy in the 70s-90s but has been falling into disrepute ever since. This 2007 analysis showed that Criminal Profilers do not outperform regular detective work. Here’s another analysis finding Profiling unreliable in its current form and suggests ways to make it more scientifically rigorous. Here’s another. 

Hi everybody it’s eleven years later and just for fun I went and looked up the latest news on forensic science and guess what? It’s still bullshit.

They’ve made up entirely new fake techniques since the last time I posted about this. Like “9-11 Call Analysis” which is supposed to identify from a person’s voice on a phone call whether they are lying. Surprise surprise: it doesn’t work.

There’s also something called SCAN – Scientific Content Analysis – that examines the statements given to the police for falsehood. This one is actually kind of promising because it uses a real scientific analysis, a grammatical formula, to map out a written personal account kind of like using an AI algorithm to diagram a sentence which can reveal that actually no I’m lying it’s total garbage

ProPublica also describes a kind of “photo analysis” which is basically whatever a Hollywood movie writer expects to happen when the detective says ENHANCE and of course it doesn’t work either.

So why are there even more forensics techniques that don’t work every few years? If forensics is fake science, why do we keep inventing more of it?

Well, because like I said way too many years ago why have I been here so long, forensics are not created by scientists, they’re created by police. And the justice system is interested in convictions, not uncovering the truth, and these techniques get you convictions. Many of them are wrongful convictions, but oh well.

Anyway in conclusion, John Oliver agrees with me and ACAB

DELETE THIS POST

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME

*clicks play in morbid curiosity*

*hammers reblog button*

I think I find this post every April Fools Day and I am so happy that I do

Why does that guillotine have a smaller hole.

It’s so you can still see the “blade” at the bottom, to trick you into thinking it went through clean.

@elodieunderglass At NO POINT in this video did I know what was going to happen next

Oh wow. Thank you so much for thinking of me!!

Hot Shit | Tom Cardy

Okay not only is this a bop but it single handedly raised my self confidence

My 2 year old is OBSESSED with this song. When we first started listening to it they loved it, and then began requesting it by name. Except we never told them the name of the song, because it's called Hot Shit and we didn't want a baby demanding, "Mama, Hot Shit!!!"

So they made up their own name, based on a toddler's understanding of the lyrics:

"Mama, can we listen to

jedi hopscotch. jedi padawans drawing hopscotch squares on floors, using jedi knights’ shoulders to chalk hopscotch onto the walls, having their masters force lift them to put them on the ceilings. every single jedi who sets foot on a square, intentionally or not, must stop what they are doing and complete the sequence. your ridiculously billowing sleeve brushed one of the squares on the wall? hope you have good control of the force bc every padawan in the hallway will start chanting at you until you wall-run through the hopscotch. sometimes there’s just a big chalk circle at the end where everyone has to do a cool flip if they step inside. eventually there’s an official hopscotch lane in every hallway in the temple. jedi hopscotch.

Padawans who are learning the jump-bounce style of Ataru designed it to catch Ataru Masters and Knights showing off their tricks. Yoda is a special favourite to watch and he’s a willing participant.

But then one day, Obi-Wan and Quin are hiding out behind a pillar and watching the hopscotch in a quiet corridor when Master Dooku walks straight into a square.

He doesn’t pause, doesn’t hesitate. He leaps. He’s a blur of swirling cloak and greying hair as he runs along the walls, steps one-two-three off the ceiling, somersaults four times in the air, and lands without a sound. He straightens his tunics, smooths his hair, looks both Padawan boys dead in the eyes and says, “No one will believe you,” and walks off.

He’s right. No one ever does.

thats the show.

Get peer reviewed @raisesomehale

You are absolutely 100% on all accounts

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