Scenes Of Crime Officers (SOCO's)

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.


OJ Simpson:

In the OJ Simpson case where he allegedly killed Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman the scenes of crime officers played a large part in how the investigation played out and a lot of blame was put on them for OJ Simpson being acquitted of the murders. The scenes of crime officers had one role in the OJ Simpson case which was to go to the scene where the crime took place so that they could collect any evidence their that was relevant to the case, once they collected the evidence they had to correctly label and tag each piece of evidence, then the evidence could be sent for further analysis. In reality, what really happened was a disaster, the SOCO team did not wear the correct PPE nor did they collect the evidence in the correct way to stop contamination, this resulted in a lot of the evidence that was found being contaminated which resulted in that evidence being useless. They where also very lazy when labeling the evidence, some pieces of evidence where missing labels and the once which had them were not done correctly which resulted in a lot of confusion when the forensic analysts tried to analyse the evidence.