Police Officers Are Not Sufficently Educated Or Trained To Understand The Use Of Digital Evidence Essay

Are police officers sufficiently educated to understand the use of Digital Evidence? Police officers are trained to do the job of policing which is keeping the country peaceful by putting the country’s laws into effect. Policing breaks into two main parts which are preventing crimes from happening and detecting crime. It never states that they have to understand and use digital evidence.
In the case of “Victor Reyes, a man who went to trail for a murder last year was found innocent even though the technology that was used could have found him guilty”. The police officers in that case used More Hit to determine that a smudged handprint they found on a duct tape around a body belong to Reyes. The Judges let the prosecutor introduce More Hits digital enhancement, the defense called it “Junk science” and had an art professor testify that the process showed how Adobe Photo shop can be used to make trick photo illustration.
“In a Riverside County case, Herman Atkins was convicted in 1988 and sentenced to 47 years in prison for a rape and robbery he did not commit”. “A state crime lab serologist provided wrong and misleading testimony suggesting that Atkins was one of the semen that was found on the body 12 years later, DNA evidence disqualified Atkins”. This was evidence that was collected by police officers and forensic scientist tried to prove him guilty and because his semen was found on the body automatically by the police he became the rapist. Because of cases such as Victor Reyes and Atkins there are people like Mary Defusco head of training for the Philadelphia public defender office, who thought that digital was better but apparently its not.
“Richard Vorder-Bruegge an FBI forensic states that a top –notch photographer with plenty of time will do an outstanding job with a 1-megapixel camera but such skill are in short supply in many police department”. Think of this what you can do in a dark room is two percent of what Photoshop is capable of doing states...