Don’t believe everything you learn from the TV detectives.
That’s the advice from the staff teaching the new interactive workshop at the National Museum of Crime & Punishment. The free workshop allows visitors to dust for fingerprints, cast shoe print molds and learn about using dental imprints in order to solve a mock investigation in the museum’s simulated crime scene investigation lab.
Michael Bybelezer, who recently completed his master’s in crime scene investigation at George Washington University, conceded he enjoys watching the “CSI” shows on television (his favorite is the one set in Las Vegas).
“Some of it I do watch, and I realize, ‘This is completely bogus,’ ” Bybelezer said. But, he added, “I am happy that they are exposing forensic sciences.”
Bybelezer is doing his part, too. He led a preview workshop recently, and the program gets under way today, with sessions at 11 a.m. and 2 p.m.
The hour-long workshops will be led by GW grad students from the CSI program. Most of them intend to go on to careers in crime scene investigation, toxicology or document examination.
Bybelezer said he found leading the workshop exciting because of how closely it tied in with class work. “It gave me an opportunity to share my knowledge,” he said.
The museum, which opened in May, was co-founded by owners of the WonderWorks amusement parks and “America’s Most Wanted” host John Walsh. The museum attempts to portray a history of crime and its consequences from the Middle Ages through the present, without glorifying the criminal lifestyle.
Each workshop will be divided into family sessions and more in-depth sessions for adult groups. The participants will be instructed on distinctions like the “class characteristics” of shoe prints, which would be the model of shoe and the years it was produced, and “individual characteristics” like the wear pattern on the sole. The fingerprint portion of the workshop will teach how to analyze a print, looking for the arch, loop and whorl formations, and noting minutia at varying points of the print to match a suspect.
