Forget the yellow crime scene tape to mark a crime scene. Students at Southwestern Community College are learning to map crime scenes using cutting-edge surveying equipment.

“We’re combining our criminal justice and surveying classes to expose our students to advanced crime-solving techniques,” said SCC CJ instructor Mike Burnette. “We are one of the first community colleges to do this and we’re one of the first to use a robot to help us.”

Students call the robot - actually a Trimble VX spatial station- Roberta and use her to measure angles and distance and calculate coordinates.

“Mike and I team teach the forensic surveying class and the reason we’ve joined with John Matchulat's crime scene processing class to show the students in both courses how surveying can greatly enhance the capture, positioning, and mapping of crime scene evidence,” said SCC surveying technology instructor Peter Messier. “It is a wonderful opportunity for cooperation between two disciplines. The law enforcement students get to see the capabilities and technology that is available, and the surveying students get to see what is needed to properly map a crime or accident scene.”

Matchulat, who spent 25 years with the Michigan State Police, said the SCC students “receive training above and beyond what you get in basic law enforcement. They’ve experienced the big picture of combining crime scene processing, forensics and surveying to properly measure and document a crime scene from an educated best case scenario. It gives them great hireability when they graduate.”

“In a normal criminal justice class you would establish your inner perimeter or “hot zone,” at the crime scene and tape that off,” said student Jan Craig of Franklin. “Then you would conduct a methodical search, sometimes it’s a line search where everybody slowly walks in a straight line down the perimeter looking for evidence. Then you would measure and sketch the scene.

“But now with Roberta we can digitally map out the scene and put in the computer. It’s a whole new perspective because most criminal justice students don’t know much, if anything, about surveying.”

“The surveying makes it so precise and accurate,” said student Meghan Cribbs of Franklin. “One of the things we learned in criminal justice was that if you don’t measure and plot correctly, it can be disputed in court. But there’s no disputing Roberta.”

Another way Roberta helps at the crime scene is marking actual depth, according to Dale Hall, SCC forensic biology instructor. “When we are out digging up bones at a crime scene, we don’t have to estimate depth because Roberta calculates it for us.”

A major benefit of bringing the disciplines together is to let students see how their actions impact others, Hall said. “Each student may be working on just one piece of an investigation but that one piece is part of a big team and you have to do your part right so the next person can do his part right…kind of like running a relay. You can’t drop the baton, all the hand offs must be good for your team to win the race.”

The diversity of the faculty enhances the program, students say. Instructors run the gamut from a detective with an underwater body and evidence recovery team, to a patrol officer who is now a magistrate, a medical laboratory technician and a professional licensed engineer and land surveyor.

“We give them real world knowledge,” said Burnette, “and in doing so we try to show them the big picture of how every piece, every person impacts the whole.”