Scene Of Crime Officer

Scenes of crime officers take part in most investigations, their only job is to go to the scene of a crime and locate, recover and record the evidence that they find so it can be sent of to forensic scientists in the lab. Once the evidence has been collected then their job is done in the investigation, but their role is extremely important as if they do not collect the evidence and label it correctly then it can affect other people in the investigation team further on in the investigation, an example of this would be if  the scenes of crime officers did not correctly tag and label each piece of evidence, this would affect the forensic analysts further on in the investigation as they would not get any additional information about the evidence they are going to analyse, if the evidence was not tagged correctly there would also be a lot of confusion as evidence would be lost because the people distributing the evidence to the labs would not know what case the evidence is from. If a scenes of crime officer attended a different investigation then their roles and responsibilities would not change, they would still be there to collect, package and label the evidence found at the scene.

Fire investigation
There is scenes of crime officers present in nearly all criminal investigation including fire investigations. According to http://www.thinkforensic.co.uk/ their overall role does not really change depending on the case, the only thing that changes is the type of evidence they are collecting and how they correctly bag and tag the evidence to ensure that contamination does not take place. Once arriving at a fire scene the scenes of crime officers are usually briefed by the first attending officer who gives them an overview of what they have found out about the crime, it is then the job of the scenes of crime officers to perform a full search of the scene to try to find any evidence they can which could be linked back to the case. One of the main things they would look for would be the seat of the fire which would be where the fire originated from because from here they would be able to determine how the fire was caused. Once they are aware of the type of fire they are dealing with (deliberate or accidental) then they can decide what to do next, if they have reason to believe that the fire was deliberately caused then they will call in the specialist dog unit and look for any evidence that may be present at the scene, if they believe that the fire was accidental then they will call in organisations such as gas and electricity advisers to find out whether it was a gas or an electrical fault that caused the fire. Scenes of crime officers are a very important part of a fire investigation as it is them who finds out whether a fire was deliberate or accidental, an advantage to having scenes of crime officers at a fire investigation scene is that they work very well alongside other organisations that are also part of the fire investigation such as the police and the specialist dog unit. They work with police very well as the police stops any unauthorized people from entering the scene which decreases the chance of contamination occurring which means that the SOCO team can do their role more effectively. They also work with the specialist dog units very well as they both work towards the same aim which is to find out how the fire was caused, the dogs also are able to locate evidence at the scene which makes the scenes of crime officers jobs easier as they only have to collect that evidence, not search for it which saves time. Overall i feel that scenes of crime officers play a very crucial role in the fire investigation team and without them other organisations would not be able to function properly, for example forensic scientists would not have evidence to examine as no other organisation has the skills needed to go into a fire scene and collect evidence.