The CSI effect is named for CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, a television program which first aired in 2000. In CSI, a fictional team of crime scene investigators solve murders in the Las Vegas metropolitan area. Researchers have described CSI’s portrayal of forensic science as ‘high-tech magic’ and say that 40 percent of the scientific techniques depicted on CSI do not exist. In real investigations, DNA and fingerprint data are often unobtainable and, when they are available, can take several weeks or months to process.
About CSI effect in brief
The CSI effect is named for CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, a television program which first aired in 2000. In CSI, a fictional team of crime scene investigators solve murders in the Las Vegas metropolitan area. Based on the Nielsen ratings, six of the top ten most popular television shows in the United States in 2005 were crime dramas. The CSI effect has been associated with drama and true crime television series that preceded CSI, such as American Justice, Cold Case Files, Cold Squad, Exhibit A: Secrets of Forensic Science, Forensic Files, Silent Witness, Waking the Dead; and others that followed. Researchers have described CSI’s portrayal of forensic science as ‘high-tech magic’ and say that 40 percent of the scientific techniques depicted on CSI do not exist. In the first season of CSI, technicians made a plaster mold of the interior of a wound to determine the type of knife used to make the wound, which is not possible with current technology. In real investigations, DNA and fingerprint data are often unobtainable and, when they are available, can take several weeks or months to process, whereas television crime labs usually get results within hours. If CSIs process a crime scene it is inappropriate for them to also be involved in the examination and testing of any evidence collected from that scene as it would compromise the impartiality of scientific evidence. In addition to using unrealistic techniques, CSI ignores all elements of uncertainty present in real investigations and instead portrays experimental results as absolute truth.
The notion that these inaccurate portrayals could alter the public perception of forensic evidence was dubbed the \”CSI effect\”, a term which began to appear in mainstream media as early as 2004. By 2009 more than 250 stories about the CSI effect had appeared in newspapers and magazines, including National Geographic, Scientific American, and U.S. News & World Report. An attorney told The New York Times in 1990 that any lawyer who doesn’t watch CSI is going to fool a juror before a trial. A 2002 survey showed that the juror’s knowledge of the legal system is significantly altered by the show’s depiction of it. The conviction rate in cases with little physical evidence has decreased due to the influence of CSI on jury members. The show’s popularity led to three spin-offs: CSI: Miami, which debuted in 2002, CSI: New York, which aired in 2004, and CSI: Cyber, which premiered in 2015. It has been recognized that media portrayals are capable of significantly altering public awareness, knowledge, and opinions, and knowledge of legal system. It is also recognized that CSI is a recent phenomenon, but it has long recognized that it is capable of altering public knowledge, knowledge and opinions of the U States legal system, and that it has had a long-term impact on the nation’s criminal justice system. In the last few years, the CSI franchise has produced a number of spin-off shows, including NCIS, NCIS: Numb3rs, Wire in the Blood, and Without a Trace.
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This page is based on the article CSI effect published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 04, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
