Teaching Forensic Science to the American Police and Public: The Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory, 1929-1938

Abstract

Established in 1929, Northwestern University’s Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory (SCDL), America’s first independent forensic crime laboratory, undertook a wide range of scientific case work during the 1930s, including toxicology, firearms identification, polygraph testing, the analysis of questioned documents and bacteriology; its mission being to provide Chicago with a world-class forensic science service. Alongside this mission, however, a key ambition of the SCDL’s founders was to forensically educate police officers, legal professionals, and the general public. Convinced that American police were largely ignorant of scientific aids to crime detection and that the public’s lack of forensic awareness led to the destruction and contamination of crime scenes, the SCDL attempted to fashion itself as a “school for manhunters.” But, while the laboratory’s ambitious program of public talks, scientific demonstrations, detective schools, expositions, and radio programs were intended to foster the creation of both a scientifically savvy public and policemen on par with those to be found in Europe, the SCDL encountered a number of significant hurdles to achieving these goals, including the hostility of some high-ranking police officials.

Guest Editorial for Academic Forensic Pathology

“…In a study of the Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory (SCDL) of Northwestern University during the 1930s, Heather Wolffram chronicles the lectures, training activities, and World’s Fair exhibit through which SCDL personnel attempted to assert a new role for laboratory-based forensic services within policing. Despite offering new capabilities in ballistics and other fields, the SCDL’s efforts had ambivalent results: police officials’ resistance to an expanded role for science in law enforcement as well as a lack of finances meant that the SCDL struggled in its outreach efforts up to 1938, when it became part of the Chicago Police Department (17).…”