That mannequin one was the one where a weapons truck, carrying guns supposedly on the way to a smelter, wrecked in a lower income neighborhood. The guns were, needless to say, stolen pretty quickly. A boy, in the 8-10 year old range I think, was shot through the neck by a gun that they assumed was from the truck. Why a police-custody evidence gun on the way to the smelter would be loaded is another question. The first assumption is that he was kneeling, I think. Been a while. They then assumed that he was standing....so the ending point on the bullet was already two feet different. That's a huge arc of possibility for the shooter's location already. Marksmanship works on the bullet's path in both directions. If you were aiming a rifle at a target, say, 100 yards away, the slightest, tiniest of flinch that you might make can throw the shot off by yards at that range. The other way around, a hit on a target can only be traced back to a starting point by the same yards. The tiniest of movement in the target/laser/rod can throw off the shooting point by multiple yards. They then found a spot of blood on a pickup nearby where the kid was shot so they then jump to the conclusion that he was standing in the bed. Another three feet tossed into the equation. They then stuck the rod into the mannequin, now being held upright in the truck bed by Delco, and he automatically aimed the rod at the boy's home right where he was hit. He only turned it in about a 45 degree arc til it pointed at an upstairs window. Why not 360 degrees? They had first assumed he was shot from the street but then didn't even look in that direction? Why did he not assume that it came from, say, the house across the street that had the same window at the same height? Why did he not assume the single spot of blood was castoff from the bullet impacting the kid and that he *was* in the yard, not the truck bed? Why did he not assume that when the shooting started the kid might have automatically ducked his head? The shot could have come from street level a half a mile away for all they knew.
On an older episode of Law and Order, a man's wife was shot dead in the bed next to him. He was passed out sleeping off a good night of drinking. They accused him of her murder since the apartment was obviously not broken into. They of course grilled him good! The lab lady later told Brisco that a 9mm, at that range would have gone through her and through the wall behind her. It was lodged in her neck. For the round to have stayed in her neck, it had to have been fired from something like 100 yards away. They then went back to the scene, used a laser to plot a line from her dead body position, through the open window, to a building roof a bit far away. They went up there and found shell casings. That was an example of valid two point vectoring. CSI-M seems to never do that right.
Another CSI-M vectoring example was a man shot dead on a park bench beside a road. They assumed he was shot by the man with the gun twenty feet away on the sidewalk. In the reconstrucion, however, they somehow figured out that he was actually shot by a man in such and such a car, sitting at the right height, the shot bounced off a tree, and hit him just so when he had his head tilted at such and such an angle.
Another flub, a man dropped his car keys on an ant hill and got ants on his hand retrieving them. He has no bites on his hand, however, in the lab. H demands that he roll up his jacket sleeve, elastic-wristed wind breaker type, and he has ant bites all up his forearm. In the reconstruction, however, he was wearing said jacket, again, elastic-cuffed, and he was only bitten on the hand. The bites on his hand that he was actually bitten on somehow went away, and bites that shouldn't be there somehow appeared on his forearm.
Another, the black guy spends five minutes explaining to Natalia (?) about the "eighth spike on the Statue Of Liberty that few know about". Supposedly on the bottom of the torch. A person was supposedly stabbed and killed with an ice spike off the torch on an ice sculpture. It takes about fifteen seconds to find there is no spike on the bottom of the torch. There's a knob. That's not a flubbed line or a mistatement, it's simply poor researching and poor writing.
Another, they tracked down a pickup truck to a Mexican drug gang bar by the tire tread pattern. They had found the pattern at the scene of a murder, looked it up and matched it to a make and model of pickup, looked that up on the registration system etc and found an owner. Problem is, and here there are two GLARING ones, is that #1, vehicles aren't matched to tire treads. The truck could have been re-tired a half a dozen times or more in its years. And #2, the tire patterns they matched to the truck sitting there in front of them in the bar's parking lot are obvious retreads.
Another, CSI NY this time, the CSI team had stashed a pallet load of cocaine (I think) in the CSI vault. A gang storms the building, fakes a gas leak to get everyone out, and then uses a .50BMG Barrett rifle to shoot connecting holes through the armor steel vault door til a huge piece falls out. They then gather the drugs and plan to escape. The .50BMG would punch holes through an armor door, no argument there, but the bullets, punching THROUGH the door means that there are large quantities of still powerful bullets ricochetting around the inside of a steel vault. As a projectile punches through armor, it also causes what we call "spall". That's masses of steel shrapnel blown off the inside of the armor at super high speed. Spall is actually deadlier than the bullet punching through. When the vault is broken into, however, the pallet of coke, wrapped in thin plastic wrapped 2 kilo bundles, is totally intact and untouched.
Delco: "Looks like all the circuit breakers are taped open". A fan in a meth lab had shorted and caused a fire. I'm guessing he meant "taped closed" since that's the only other alternative. Closed breakers carry electricity, not open ones.
Don't get me wrong, though. I love my crime shows like I love my westerns. They all have the occasional mix-ups, though.
Be safe and be well, sir! An honor chatting with you!
reply
share
citizenofdis
9 years ago
I am not saying that in TV there aren't going to be flubs, and among them some major whoppers, but there is a difference between writers getting something wrong and a character getting something wrong. I think the "biggest flub ever" is an example of the latter, as it is Frank who says the bit about the casings - we do not for example see anybody pick them up close to the crime scene. Or another example (from the episode where a guy got dissolved in a swimming pool) with Frank - even though it was made clear that it wasn't acid but a base (and the electronic pH reader correctly indicated a high value going down as they neutralized, although there was no need to go all the way to 7) Frank - and only Frank - referred to it throughout the episode as acid.
reply
share