Honing Skills on Crime Scene Reconstruction
With heightened criminal activity, personnel from the National Forensic Science Service are receiving training in forensic ballistics, toxicology and legal medicine. A team of technical experts, through the support of the Democratic Security Directorate of SICA, are here building the capacity of the unit. This morning, News Five’s Duane Moody was at the B.D.F. Shooting Range near Hattieville where Firearms Examiners and Crime Scene Technicians were honing their skills on crime scene reconstruction assessments for shooting incidents. Here is that story.
Duane Moody, Reporting
They are an important part of data collection at crime scenes and they work in tandem with the Police Department and by extension the Prosecution Branch in providing evidence used to solve crimes. Scenes of Crime personnel and those attached to the National Forensic Science Service are often limited in the time it takes to process a scene, but since the beginning of this week, they are being trained by technical experts on crime scene reconstruction.
Ebony Lyall-Nicholas
Ebony Lyall-Nicholas, Assistant Director, Forensic Laboratory of Belize
“It’s a training for crime scene reconstruction, specifically shooting scene reconstruction, which at any given time would involve the crime scene officer and may or may not involve a ballistics expert. So what we did is get the ballistics experts from the laboratory along with crime scene officers to get this training. This training sets a foundation for us to be able to properly process shooting scenes in the future. It will require a lot more training than this, but this is kind of a foundation to build upon what was already learnt and to start what we need to learn in the future.”
The training is being done through support from the I-Crime Project of the Central American Integration System (SICA). That technical support comes in the form of ballistic experts from Spain, who, today, took the Belizean technicians out to the B.D.F. shooting range to put the week-long skills they’ve learnt to the test.
Adolfo Busta
Adolfo Busta, Technical Expert [Translated]
“It is part of a capacity building programme. It is a collaborative work to implement measurements and processes that allow us to work a crime scene quickly and efficiently. When processing a scene, it should be a team—no more than three persons should be on a scene. What you are seeing here is three persons working and the others are invisible. They are watching what the team is doing.”
Assistant Director of the Forensic Laboratory of Belize, Ebony Lyall-Nicholas says that the equipment used in today’s exercise is the property of the government. She speaks on how proper equipment and knowledge, adds to the investigative process for law enforcement.
Ebony Lyall-Nicholas
“What this does, this helps to put together the story of what happened. So they will study what we call terminal ballistics, so damages that the bullet has caused to determine what type of bullet may have caused it from what distance the bullet may have been shot, where the person was standing. If there was a victim and the damage from the victim, what direction it came from – to basically put the story together along with of course the information that’s gotten from the investigation.”
Duane Moody for News Five.
