First Attending Officer

A main part of the collection of evidence process is speaking with the first attending officer, upon the scenes of crime officers arriving at the scene the first thing they must do is communicate with the first attending officer who will give the team an overview of what he has found out about the case so far from being there. Some of this information would include what type of crime they will be dealing with (e.g. murder, burglary, drugs), where the majority of the evidence is located, an overview of the area where the crime scene is located and the people who were involved as well as any witnesses that may be present at that time. This information can be very beneficial to the scenes of crime officers and can dramatically speed up the time that it would take them to analyse the scene as they now know exactly what case they are working on and what types of evidence they should be specifically looking for.

OJ Simpson

In the OJ Simpson case where he allegedly killed Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman the first attending Robert Riske did not do the job that he was supposed to at the crime scene and this was mainly down to him not planning out his role properly, the procedures that are meant to be followed when investigating a crime scene (such as PPE, common approach path, marking pieces of evidence, etc.) were not followed out as they should of done. Robert Riske was the first attending officer at the scene shortly followed by another officer called Miguel Terrazas, it was their job to assess the scene so that when the SOCO team arrived to collected the evidence they could direct them around the scene. It was also their job to question witnesses to see what they knew about the crime that took place but it was later revealed that all the officers asked the neighbors was how they found the scene. As neither of the agents placed crime scene tape around the perimeter of the scene it was very easy for the media to enter the crime scene to take pictures of the crime that had took place, as the officers knew that they would not want the case in the papers this early (as this comes in a later stage in the investigation) they tried to cover up the evidence using towels that where found in Nicole's house to stop the evidence and the bodies being photographed, this basically destroyed a lot of the evidence at the scene as the towels had contaminated it.