The CSI Competition

Each year at the Police Cadet Training Academy, cadets are given a series of challenges and competitions based on their level of training and how many years they have attended the Academy. My second year returning, the theme of the Advanced stage (Second year cadets) was Crime Scene Investigation. Over two hundreds cadets were involved in the Advanced Program that year, and were all participants in the CSI competition. Each of us were presented with a staged crime scene. It was up to the cadet to enter the scene, collect, document, photograph, and then write a report on the scene and to present a theory of what occurred on the scene based on the evidence collected. In the crime scene which had been presented to me, a man had been shot in the shoulder while sitting in his desk chair in front of legal papers. I was able to accurately draw a diagram of the office room, photograph the bullet shell casing, photograph the chair and determine the angle of the shot which had been fired, and discern by the papers on his desk in addition to evidence found at the scene and known about the victim what the potential motive might have been to prepare a report speculating the cause of death, motive, and potential suspects. Based on the report I presented in comparison to the others written by the two hundred plus other cadets participating in this challenge, mine was chosen as the most detailed and accurate summary of the scene and I won first place that year for the CSI competition. Since I have had a broad fascination with Crime Scene Investigation and can see myself possibly pursuing this as a career path in the future.