Swedish crime scene technicians: facilitations,epistemic frictions and professionalization from the outside

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the role of crime scene technicians in the Swedish criminal justice system, and particularly how Swedish crime scene technicians not only examine crime scenes but also facilitate the criminal justice system’s joint production of forensic evidence. It proposes thinking about the criminal justice system as a conglomeration of epistemic cultures, that is, of communities with different ways of producing and understanding forensic evidence. Such a perspective makes it possible to understand interprofessional frictions as epistemic frictions as well as to draw attention to the facilitations, mediations and translations that crime scene technicians perform. This perspective also makes it possible to illuminate how the crime scene technicians’ professionalization – a professionalization from the outside – affects both their future crime scene work and their facilitations.