Mark Millican
Dalton Daily Citizen
DALTON —
As a volunteer with the Dalton Police Department, Anne Martin gets a closer look at law enforcement work than the average city resident. But during the crime scene investigation (CSI) segment of this year’s Citizens’ Police Academy, she saw that most crimes aren’t solved within the easy one-hour time slot of prime time TV.
“CSI is a lot more labor-intensive than what good old Mark Harmon does on NCIS (Naval Criminal Investigative Service),” she said Tuesday evening at the Police Services Center on Jones Street. “I have a criminal justice degree, and I find police work very interesting.”
Martin said she actually looked at the 1978 unsolved murder scene of Bob Crane (Col. Hogan on the TV show “Hogan’s Heroes”) in California as part of her course work.
Her husband, Joe Martin, said he was taking the Dalton course with his wife because of her interest and the fact that he has friends who are police officers back in Phoenix, Ariz. Asked what he learned about local criminal investigations, he replied with a laugh, “They don’t drive around in eight Hummers.”
Veteran Detective Mack Flood led the class, mixing a power-point presentation on investigative techniques with pass-around samples like fingerprints and plaster casts of tire tracks and boot prints. Class members were also able to tour the department’s Crime Scene Unit van parked outside.
“Juries want to see things like DNA (evidence), fingerprints and ‘retinal scans,’ although there’s no such thing,” he said of the scans in pointing out some of the dramatics of TV crime shows. He related a local case going back a few weeks where the evidence was more mundane.
“We found two or three cigarette butts outside at a burglary scene,” he said. “The family didn’t smoke and they hadn’t had anybody over who smoked. A lot of times the burglar will smoke to get his courage up, then throw down the cigarette and say, ‘Here I go.’ On TV they do DNA evidence (on the cigarette butt), but that costs around $3,000. Do citizens want us to spend that much money on that?”
Flood told how different rural law enforcement agencies in the Southeast “broke” a church arson case many years ago by taking plaster casts of tire tracks found at the scenes and comparing them.
“It was a Sears all-season tire, the ‘Guardian’ if I remember correctly,” he said. “They determined the stores where that brand was sold and tracked him down.”
In 1999, an Indiana man named Jay Scott Ballinger was sentenced to 42 years in prison for several church fires there and in the Southeast — one of which cost a volunteer firefighter his life in Commerce, Ga. — that included the December 1988 arson cases of Amazing Grace Baptist Church and Mountain View Baptist Church in Murray County, according to a U.S. Department of Justice news release. Flood said he was unsure if Ballinger was the individual arrested on the tire tread evidence.
Asked about attendance at the academy, police spokesman Bruce Frazier responded, “Mostly it’s just average citizens who are interested in how the police department works. There are some who are interested in law enforcement as a possible career.”
Victor Cervantes said he’s attending the academy “just to learn more” about police work.
“I’m not really interested in it as a career, just to get a better understanding about their duties,” he said. “The CSI part is very interesting, nothing compared to what you see on TV ... there’s a lot more work involved.”
Cynthia Allgood said she plans on majoring in criminal justice.
“I am planning on going back to school this fall, so I wanted to get some info on the department and the different aspects of law enforcement,” she said. “It’s a lot more technical than what you think it is. It is definitely not as glamorous as they want you to think it will be (on TV).”
Flood is a graduate of the University of Tennessee Anthropological Research Facility (http://web.utk.edu/~fac/), also known as the “Body Farm,” where decomposing bodies are studied in Knoxville. He showed photos of his participation there, as well as pictures of local police cases.
Despite his warning that some of the scenes were graphic, none of the almost two dozen attendees proved squeamish but instead studied the unusual portfolio and tried to pick out clues.
Academy info
The Citizens’ Police Academy sponsored by the Dalton Police Department is a free annual course that begins each February. The application process starts in the fall and is open to anyone. The 10-week program meets once a week for three hours on Tuesday nights, and there is a graduation banquet the week after the final class.
“Participants aren’t required to take a ride-along with an officer, but we encourage them to,” said police spokesman Bruce Frazier. “Most of them usually do.
For more information, go to the department’s Web site at www.daltonpdblog.org.
“The academy is valuable because it clears up a lot of misconceptions that people in the community have about the police. You may see a police car driving on the road or see officers in uniform out in the community, but you may not really understand what we’re doing. This program lets citizens see behind the scenes of every part of our department. We are here to serve, and I think this program reinforces that message and opens new lines of communication within our community. It also teaches citizens about different trends we see in local criminal activity, which helps them to protect themselves and feel empowered to avoid becoming victims of crime.”
— Dalton Police Chief Jason Parker
