Securing evidence: blood spots

OK, Natsumi. So we’re a little bit away from the crime scene now, and we’ve found some suspected spots of dried blood. Yes. So, we don’t know whether these are from the victim, the suspect. They could be there by chance, but it’s best that we take some swabs of that blood so we can send it back to the lab, see if it definitely is blood and maybe get a DNA profile from it that we can perhaps link to someone who may have been involved in the offence. So what I’m going to do now is just take my swab, and the blood hasn’t dried enough so that we can take a small amount of the liquid sample.

So as you can see, I’m just taking a small amount of strain on my swab, and then all I have to do is package it back in its original container, being very careful not to move the blood off the swab. Then, this is going to go straight into a polythene evidence bag, like the rest of our evidence, just to preserve it. And we can seal that off and send it to the lab. OK.