CSI at Maesteg Comprehensive School
On Tuesday 17th of May students at Maesteg Comprehensive who are involved in the PUPIL Scheme and PCSO Bella Rees of Maesteg Neighbourhood Policing Team were given the opportunity to get inked up! Julie Gurner who is one of the forces Fingerprint Officers attended the school and delivered a fascinating talk on how fingerprints are formed, differences between individual fingerprints and the technologies available to the police to match fingerprints to persons.
Pupils were able to look at scenes of crimes marks from real incidents and hear true stories about how single pieces of evidence were used in criminal trials. Students were then given the opportunity to take their own fingerprints and use technologies to study them to identify what style of fingerprint they had. The talk followed on from the previous week where Scenes of Crime Officer Charlene Quinn delivered a session on what sort of actions are taken to preserve and identify forensic evidence at crime scenes.
PCSO Bella Rees said “Burglary is the current Llangynwyd PACT priority and therefore the sessions allowed students to ask questions about forensic science identification methods that they have read/heard about in relation to recent llynfi valley burglaries".
The opportunity to relate their new found knowledge to incidents that have occurred locally made the sessions more ‘real’ and questions came thick and fast”. Both weeks provided the students with a rare insight into forensic science and some of the behind the scenes work that occurs in the lead up to successful prosecutions. Big thank you to Scenes of Crime Dept. and the Fingerprint Office for making the sessions such a success.