A forensic expert collecting evidence at a crime scene.
© AFP/FileLONDON (AFP) - The likes of "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation", a hit US series about forensic crime investigators which has been syndicated around the world, could assist criminals in evading the law, New Scientist magazine reported.
Some forensic scientists are even becoming reluctant to co-operate with the media because they fear criminals are learning about the techniques police use to catch them, the magazine said.
"People are forensically aware," Professor Guy Rutty, from the University of Leicester in central England, told the magazine.
Among examples cited by the article was an increasing use of plastic gloves by burglars, and a practice reported by police in northern England in which car thieves leave cigarette butts picked up from the street inside vehicles, hoping to lay a trail of false DNA evidence.
However, the magazine warned that outwitting the scientists was increasingly hard.
In a test of DNA contamination, Rutty asked a volunteer to walk around a sterile room while speaking. He was able to retrieve the man's DNA even though he had been in the room only a few seconds.
Dr Peter Bull, a forensic sedimentologist at the University of Oxford in southern England, said even forensic scientists could at most hope to send police down an initially false investigative route.
"If you want to commit the perfect murder there's one thing I'll ask you: 'Do you feel lucky, punk?'," he told the magazine.
The magazine notes that trying to outwit DNA evidence is as old as the science itself.
In 1988, the world's first murder case involving DNA evidence initially failed because the British killer persuaded a friend to submit a sample on his behalf, an error only corrected when his stand-in bragged about the cover-up to friends.
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