Tour of Phoenix Crime Lab

I love the show CSI, in fact I’ve been watching it since I was in grade school and at one point in my life I thought I might like to be a forensic scientist (the amount of math and science involved later, turned me away from this career however). I also knew a little bit about the Crime Lab having come from a family with a cop as a dad and having only ever spent time with other police families. Granted everything I knew about the crime lab was not good, in fact during the Base Line Serial Killer case, one detective remarked that the crime lab couldn’t even find their own fingerprints on their hands. With that said, I was looking forward to compare the stories I had heard and the shows I had seen with the actual lab itself. The building looked very interesting on the outside and the inside of it was very nice and clean and bright, nothing like the labs of the show. However, I wasn’t really impressed with this little artsy-fartsy sculpture they had hanging from the roof; while it was cool in a way I was kind of disappointed that my tax dollars went into funding for a sculpture. There were a cool few things about the crime lab tour, for instance my favorite part was the old gun display. It had a German Luger, a MG-34, Type-99, Tommy gun and many more old and interesting guns that are over 60 years old! It was amazing getting to see the guns I had only heard about in books and seen on TV and video games. I can just imagine everything they’ve been used for and how at one point in time they were used to gun down American and Russian soldiers and even law enforcement officers; the history of the gun is what fascinated me most. Other than the gun display I didn’t really find anything else all that interesting. My back started to hurt because I was standing for so long and I kind of got a little bored, because basically we were just looking into rooms and looking at pictures. However, it was interesting to see how real life stacked up against fantasy.