The Role of Police in the Making of Forensic Science: The San José Police School,1930–1959

Abstract

In a wider discussion of "the CSI effect", it has become standard to say that deficiencies in forensic science have come about because the procedures and technologies developed as policing techniques outside of university-based scientific research. But this has not been examined as a historical question. Looking back at the teaching of forensic science within the Police School at San José State University, the first police school in the United States, it is possible to explore the role of police in the making of forensic science. Based on archival materials, including correspondence within the August Vollmer Papers and newspapers in San José and San Francisco, the analysis found that forensic science faculty at the Police School were PhD scientists who taught scientific methods, not police managers coaching recruits in techniques they invented; mistaken ideas, such as the lie detector, came from police techniques but also the scientists, who promoted the race science of anthropometric identification; and the Police School built a relationship with the local crime laboratory that brought the best forensic science had to offer. Police recruits learned the axiomatic understandings of forensic science—Locard's exchange principle and Kirk's concept of individualization—along with laboratory tests of crime scene evidence. The Police School improved forensic science from what it would have been without it, because in the San Francisco Bay area of the 1920s and 1930s the validity of forensic testimony in courts varied widely.