Arrested in D.C.

I was once detained by a cop in New Orleans in 1996 (for the crime of walking down the street), and I'll never forget how mad (or naiive) I was about it. I had no idea why I was being detained. It was only later, when my fiance got home from work that evening, that I realized that the cop thought I was a prostitute. I wasn't dressed like one, but that didn't matter. I was on a "bad street," therefore I must be a hooker.

That pissed me off, but this is ridiculous! I'm quite sure that my civil rights were violated. Talk about your biased lineup! I don't look anything like those guys. This could ruin my chances of getting a security clearance - geez.

My friend Rashmi and I enjoyed our trip to the Washington D.C. National Museum of Crime & Punishment on Sunday. She, too, was booked. But she managed to escape from her jail cell through the cinderblock wall.

Ok, so it was kind of a large hole.

The one-hour CSI Lab Workshop was fun. The audience was given a homicide to solve and participated in an interactive demonstration given by real CSIs, one of whom graduated from the GWU forensics Masters program.


A shoeprint mold was taken from a footprint left in soil. And we all got to lift latent fingerprints from a framed photo found at the crime scene. Instead of using a fiber fingerprint brush we used a magnetic brush, which was cool.

At the end of the workshop we went upstairs to visit the staged crime scene and examine the evidence. Many of the things we talked about were the same things that I'm currently learning about in my Intro to Criminal Investigations class. It was good to do this workshop on Sunday, as the very next day was "Crime Scene Night" at school—a day that my classmates and I have looked forward to since the semester started.

Rashmi and I toured the museum. We saw John Dillinger's gorgeous car, not to mention a lock of his hair, which was quite the souvenir to obtain after his execution on July 22, 1934 by rogue FBI agents. All John Dillinger ever wanted was to "be a bank robber," a dream that lead to his death at the age of 31.

We also saw the famous Bonnie & Clyde vehicle, riddled with bullet holes.

In the museum section that covers types of goernment executions, there is a glass-enclosed robot measuring about a foot long and maybe 8" high. It is armed with a syringe and is labeled "Prototype: Lethal Injection Attack Droid." I called Rashmi over to check it out.

She took one look and (in her usual quick wit) replied matter-of-factly, "Man, they're cutting back on jobs everywhere."

I couldn't stop laughing for several minutes. :)