Career Planning in Criminal Justice by Thomas J Doyle

Author:Thomas J Doyle [Lucia, Robert C. De; Doyle, Thomas J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-43772-895-8
Publisher: Elsevier Science
Published: 1998-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms

In operation for close to a century, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) laboratory system provides scientific support services to the Bureau's combined responsibilities of law enforcement, industry regulation, tax collection, and state assistance. Some major concerns of the ATF scientists include product analysis, consumer protection, analysis of firearms and explosives evidence, and applied research to develop new analytical techniques in these areas. ATF scientists and technicians also provide expert testimony in court cases.

The ATF laboratory system is divided into three headquarters laboratories: chemical, forensic, and identification. These are located in Washington, DC. The headquarters office maintains a scientific library and a complete photographic laboratory. Four regional labs are located in Atlanta, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and San Francisco.

In the ATF chemical laboratory, samples of all alcoholic beverages marketed in the United States are analyzed for both tax purposes and consumer protection. ATF regulates more than 100 different categories of products using industrial or denatured alcohol, from foods, drugs, and toiletries to embalming fluids and rocket fuels, and determines the eligibility of internal medicines, food products, and flavoring extracts for prepaid tax rebates.

Another task confronting the chemical lab is tobacco analysis, to distinguish between cigarette and cigar filler tobacco. Since the tax on cigarettes is more than five times greater than the tax on small cigars, the potential for revenue loss is great. The chemical laboratory is also responsible for calibration of alcohol-gauging instruments such as the hydrometer, a device used to measure the density of liquid.

The identification laboratory is responsible for examining a wide variety of physical evidence submitted in connection with criminal cases. These examinations encompass a broad spectrum of scientific disciplines and include questioned document verifications (handwriting, typewriting identifications), fingerprint identifications, firearms and toolmark identifications, speaker identifications by the voiceprint method, and ink and paper analyses.

The ATF's identification laboratory maintains the world's largest ink standards library. The library contains ink samples, results of chemical analyses and the first date of production of each standard ink sample. The ink library allows inks on questioned documents to be identified and dated, a valuable capability for the detection of fraudulent documents.

In discussing ATF's forensic laboratory, it is interesting to note that it performs about 80 percent of its work for state and local law enforcement agencies upon request. This laboratory performs mainly chemical and instrumental examinations of evidence.

In investigations of arson, incendiaries, bombs, and other destructive devices, the ATF forensic chemists attempt to determine the type of explosive used and the components of the destructive device, such as pipe, clock, or battery. These investigators are aided by such highly sensitive equipment as the Vapor Trace Analyzer, an explosives sniffer that detects vapors from commercial explosives both before and after detonation.

Many comparative analyses of evidence are performed by ATF forensic specialists, who match known samples of evidence with questioned samples. X-ray analysis and the emission spectrograph (enabling rapid comparison of metal fragments and paint samples), and neutron activation analysis (a process which detects elements at very low levels), provide fast and accurate results for these comparative analyses.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.