Fingerprints? No problem, thanks to Fayetteville’s new crime scene van

By JOHN MUNFORD
jmunford@TheCitizenNews.com

When it comes to collecting evidence, Fayetteville police can now take their show on the road a lot easier.

The department now has a crime scene van, stocked with equipment to collect fingerprints in a variety of ways, make casts of footprints or tire tracks, basically to identify who the bad guys are, police said.

Take the “small particle reagent” for example. It’s a solution that can be used instead of the black powder to show fingerprints, especially in bad weather, said Det. Bob Bautista, who is the department’s crime scene specialist.

“Say we’re in the middle of a rainstorm and we have several auto break-ins,” Bautista said. “It’s raining cats and dogs, but if we know there might be fingerprints ... we can get the fingerprints.”

Bautista, a nine-year veteran of the Fayetteville force, is a state-certified identification technician after a 188-hour training course and an addtional 40-hour internship with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s crime lab. The topics ranged from fingerprint development, classification and identification to photography for crime scenes and evidence presentation.

Although all detectives have basic training in collecting fingerprints and crime scene processing, having Bautista specialize on those tasks allows other detectives to concentrate on other specialties such as interviewing witnesses and suspects, said Lt. Beverly Trainor.

Prior to the recent roll-out of the crime scene van, some of the department’s evidence collecting equipment remained at the police headquarters, Trainor said. That meant in some cases the evidence needed to be brought to headquarters for processing when possible, or the equipment was brought out into the field, Trainor said.

Detectives also have cases in their individual cars that have some of the crime scene processing materials in them, Bautista noted. Implementing the crime scene van to assist detectives is a credit to Police Chief Johnny Roberts, Bautista added.

Bautista’s van, which replaced his unmarked detective’s car, also is equipped with extra storage to lock up evidence collected at a scene. The van also has a mobile toolkit stocked with what Bautista needs if the crime scene is hard to get to, he added.

And at $18,600, the van was $3,000 less than replacing Bautista’s Crown Victoria unmarked car, Trainor noted.

“it wasn’t a huge expense,” Trainor said. “We basically had everything we needed to put in it.”

The crime scene van is a marked unit with lights and sirens in case Bautista has to cut through traffic for a quick response.

Fayetteville’s crime scene van will also be made available for other smaller police agencies in Fayette County, Trainor said. With Fayetteville continuing to grow, and criminal activity on the rise, the use of a specialized crime scene unit made sense, Trainor added.

In the future, Bautista hopes to get a fingerprint comparitor for the department which will allow for fingerprints from a crime scene to be compared mathematically to prints of a particular suspect. Bautista would also like to see a computer put in the van so it can link to the citywide computer network all the other patrol cars use for communications and submitting reports wirelessly to headquarters.