The Connection

The Alexandria Citizens’ Police Academy is a 10-week course hosted by the Alexandria Police Department (APD) to offer citizens a better understanding of how the department works. Throughout the course, participants sit in on emergency calls and ride along with police officers on patrol.

In the fourth week of the course, the tour of the APD’s Criminal Investigations Section continued with a focus on the collection and processing of evidence.

VIOLENT CRIMES

One has to really love police work to work the violent crimes unit. While various other police offices highlight civic engagement or technology skills, according to Sgt. Dave Cutting, the violent crimes unit is the most traditional investigations unit, and one of the most taxing.

“You’re only in this unit if you like your job,” said Cutting. “This is the unit most often called back to work in the middle of the night. You have to have a family that’s OK with not being home.”

Three detectives work on homicides, but while the city only experienced four total homicides in 2015, the detectives look at every unattended death to rule out the possibility of foul play. This averages to about 10 cases each week. Investigators in violent crimes also look into all serious assaults and all adult missing persons cases, which averages to approximately two per week.

When assigned to a case, Cutting says the work doesn’t end when the case is solved. Each investigator stays with the case throughout the trial. For Cutting, that recently meant testifying in 2015 at the Charles Severance trial for a case he’d started working over a decade ago with the murder of Nancy Dunning.

SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT

The Special Victims Unit handles most child-related crimes, and Sgt. Jeff Harrington says it can be as troubling as that sounds. Most of the investigations center around suspected abuse and sexual assault of children, many of which are reported by teachers or counselors. Like the Violent Crimes Unit, many of the Special Victims calls come in the middle of the night. More than once, Harrington says he was woken up in the middle of the night to go out to a hospital to investigate whether the bruises on an infant indicated that it could have been abused.

The unit also handles runaways, and interviews each of them after they are found to assess the risks at their home life and their experiences while on the street. In March, there were 25 runaway cases, and one detective is assigned to cover all of them.

CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATORS

Crime Scene Investigators do exactly what their name implies; they arrive at the scene of a crime and search the areas for clues, collecting fingerprints, physical evidence, and carefully photographing each stage of the process. In an ideal world, Crime Scene Investigators arrive at a scene and work through their processes from least intrusive investigations to most destructive, but it doesn’t always work out this way. Investigator Tom Israel noted that the last homicide that he worked on, there was impression evidence, blood and prints in the sand near the water. But as it started to rain, the evidence started washing away, and the investigators had to move quickly to preserve that evidence.

Crime Scene Investigations often encounter a variety of obstacles, including animals.

“If you die, your cat will start to eat you as soon as they get hungry,” said Patterson. “In rural areas, wild animals can carry a crime scene miles apart.”

These scenes are often grisly, but Patterson says investigators get desensitized to it in college.

“It has to be part of the job,” said Patterson. “Some things still get to you after years, like smells, but we still have to do the job: for the family and for the victim.”

COMPUTER FORENSICS

Alexandria Police’s secret weapon, according to Captain Gregg Ladislaw in Criminal Investigations, is Martin Hoffmaster. Whether it’s a murder or a scam or a child abuse case, all computer evidence is processed through Hoffmaster’s lab. Ladislaw said that other agencies from around the region regularly call asking for Hoffmaster’s assistance on cases.

Hoffmaster works in a sealed interior room with no windows and virtually no company. The room is filled with computers of various sizes and types, monitors lining the walls. This is Hoffmaster’s crime scene, and tucked inside each of the computers could be evidence vital to solving a case.

“Detectives interview people, I interview computers,” said Hoffmaster.

Computer forensics is the preservation and analysis of computer data to present in court. However, Hoffmaster says in his over 10 years of working computer forensics, he’s only had to go to court seven or eight times, including a recent appearance at the Severance murder trial.

“Most times when I find something on somebody’s computer, they don’t want that out in the open,” said Hoffmaster. “And if it’s there, I’m going to find it.”

The field of computer forensics was popularized by the investigation of the B.T.K. killer in the early 2000s, where police were able to track the computer he was using from metadata collected off of a floppy disk he had mailed into the police. Lately, Hoffmaster says the job has been getting a little more difficult as the devices and hard drives are getting larger and larger and store more data.

One common type of forensic investigation centers around suicide. Ladislaw says that less than 20 percent of suicide victims leave a note, and that many families have a hard time believing that there was no foul play.

“It’s not a crime, but we run a computer search to help give closure to the family,” said Hoffmaster. “We’ve have families cry harder when they accept that it was a suicide than when they first found out their loved one had died, because it means accepting it.”

Next week, the Citizen’s Police Academy takes a trip to an abandoned corner of Landmark Mall to examine the use of force and defensive tactics employed by the APD.