an importance of crime scene approach HUMAN COMPONENT

 The world's first crime laboratory was established by Edmond Locard in Lyon, France during 1910.  The famous Locard Exchange Principle that "every contact leaves a trace" is named for him, after Locard solved a strangling case by using fingernail scrapings.  In America, a few major cities and the FBI obtained crime labs during the 1930s, and by the mid-1970's (the birth of criminal justice), 47 states had crime labs.  A few criminal justice programs that existed prior to the explosion of the field in 1974 offered a criminalistics or forensic science concentration, but today, most criminal justice programs only have one course in criminal investigation.  Post-1975, the criminal justice model became an attempt to make sense of whole systems of justice, and the criminology model, dominated heavily by sociology until about 1990, became theory, research, and policy-driven.  Many criminalists consider themselves (professional) criminologists, but few criminologists consider themselves criminalists.

THE IMPORTANCE OF CRIME LABS