Interview

The Forensic Teacher Magazine: Hi Lesley. How are you? How is the weather up there in Alaska?

FT: Really?

LH: Yeah. We had record snow this year so it’s going to be a while.

FT: Wow. Are you near Anchorage?

LH: Yes.

FT: You’re in Wasilla?

LH: No (laughs), now that, that is famous. No, I’m in Anchorage. Wasilla is about an hour north.

FT: That’s good. Most of what America knows about Alaska is, unfortunately, restricted to shows like Alaska State Troopers.

LH: I know. People tell me about that one and the gold rush one and the crab fishing one, Deadliest Catch. And of course, I’ve never seen any of them.

FT: How do you know Jeanette (FT’s contributing editor)? Did you two used to work together?

LH: No. My first director, George Taft, knew Jeanette because he was writing a forensic book for teachers, and Jeanette worked with him on that. George Taft and I stay in touch and he knew that I used to be a teacher. We ended up connecting about her project she does collecting shoeprints by email, then I finally met her when she came up to visit George once [ed. note: George was the Director of the Alaska Crime Laboratory].

FT: Yes, she speaks very highly of him.

LH: Sure. He’s a great, great man.

FT: So, tell me about your career as a teacher.

LH: Well, I taught for four years

FT: In Alaska?

LH: Yes.

FT: Have you lived in Alaska your whole life?

LH: Yes. Well, my parents moved here when I was in first grade.

FT: That’s close enough.

LH: I taught junior high science for two years, and then I taught high school chemistry for two years.

FT: How did you get interested in forensics?

LH: This is a great story. I used to have George Taft speak to my chemistry students, and he would talk about the lab. One day we were chatting at lunch, and he mentioned he had an opening and was encouraging me about applying. I was interested, but I thought, ‘I really like teaching,” and then I thought about my own kids who were little and thought it would be nice to have a job where you don’t take so much home. So, I applied for it, thinking I could always decide later because then I heard there were over 100 people who applied.

FT: Wow.

LH: And the process took quite a while.

FT: What were all these people applying for? What was the position?

LH: It was for a criminalist I position. It was an entry level criminalist position. And that’s the trend you’ll see when there’s forensic jobs open. There’s tons of applicants. When you need people with experience, of course it’s like anything else. The pool is much more limited in the applications you get.

FT: So this job was for the person who goes to the crime scene and processes it, is that right?

LH: I moved around a little bit. My first job was in the fingerprint section, the first job opening was for a fingerprint examiner. So I did fingerprint evidence, print evidence, and crime scene. I did that for a few years. At that time fingerprint examiners made less than criminalists. And then a criminalist position opened up that was drug analysis.

FT: And you taught chemistry.

LH: And I taught chemistry, so I applied for that and got it. For a while I would do the drug analysis and also fingerprint the packaging. We traveled long distances to testify here.

FT: Sure.

LH: So, for a while that was something I tried to do for the places that were really far away, if one person had to testify for drugs and latent prints.

FT: You were working for the state police?

LH: It was the state crime lab.

FT: So you were centrally located? In Anchorage?

LH: Yes.

FT: When you were a fingerprint examiner…how much of that is done by computers, like on TV, where they just put up a print and the matches just flip up on the screen.

LH: That’s a really good question. The computer database finds possible matches, but it’s a latent examiner who does the identification.

FT: Oh.

LH: You can do it onscreen, but there’s more. You can set it so the computer finds the top 20 candidates, and then you have to look through all 20. But the one you end up identifying isn’t always the number one hit because there might be distortion in the latent or maybe the 10-print wasn’t taken very clearly. The computer doesn’t always sort those things out.

FT: I see. And you were using AFIS? [ed. note: Automated Fingerprint Identification System]

LH: Yes. AFIS is the database to search.

FT: Did you find fingerprinting rewarding?

LH: I really liked fingerprinting; I like doing puzzles. I miss that kind of work.

FT: And then toxicology came up?

LH: Actually, it’s not toxicology because that’s looking at body fluids. It’s controlled substance analysis. I’m getting a chemical ID on marijuana or cocaine or controlled pills.

FT: How long did you do that job?

LH: I did that for three or four years, and then I actually had about three or four months doing something else. The drug analysis is a little rote after the initial instrumentation, and the lady I student taught with was retiring, and I actually went back to teaching for about three months.

FT: Did you say to yourself, ‘Wow, I miss this,’ or…

LH: I did. You know, I missed the creativity, I missed the kids, but I went back and…you know, it was such a shock to be back there. I don’t know how else to describe it. There were mixed feelings, you know? Teachers are such great people, I love working with teachers. The kids are great. They had more issues than the school I’d been at before, but that didn’t really matter. In one class there were no books.

FT: I’ve been down that road.

LH: Yeah, then you know what a struggle it is to come up with materials.

FT: Uh huh, because they can’t read or do homework.

LH: Or you’re Xeroxing all afternoon.

FT: After school.

LH: Yeah. You know, I really disappointed George by leaving.

FT: Why did you leave? Did you want to see if teaching still had the magic it used to?

LH: On the drug analysis job, well, I had been talking to my past student teacher supervisor who was leaving, and drug analysis had gotten not that challenging, and I thought, ‘You know, my kids are a little older. I sort of felt as though teaching was my calling, so I thought I’d try it again. And I quickly realized one of the things I really wanted to go back for was that teacher and, of course, she was gone.

FT: She retired.

LH: She retired and moved to the East Coast.

FT: And that was the end of the school year?

LH: She retired at the end of the year. I started at the beginning of the next.

FT: So, you went from September to Christmas.

LH: I actually went in and talked to George and he had another opening that was in the criminalistics section, and it was doing shoe prints and tire tracks, and I could get back involved with crime scenes, and he was definitely willing to work with me in getting back in there.

FT: OK.

LH: But I didn’t feel great about leaving in the middle of the school year so I offered to stay until the end of the school year. But they ended up finding someone, a new teacher all ready to go, so it all just worked out.

FT: I understand. Now, this new job in foot impressions and tire prints, every day is different? It doesn’t get like toxicology, does it?

LH: Right. I find it very challenging. In this kind of forensics there is still a lot of research that needs to be done, and there’s not a whole lot of people who do it, either. So fast forward ten years and I’ve gotten really involved with it, I’ve published three or four research papers and I just submitted three more this year.

FT: Great!

LH: And there are two Encyclopedia of Forensics books out there, and I’ve written the footwear section for both.

FT: Do you get called as a footwear expert?

LH: I did when I was with the state crime lab, but two years ago I went private, so now I’m a private forensic consultant specializing in shoe prints and tire tracks. 

FT: Neat.

LH: I also do training in the US and Canada, and do casework in the US and Canada.

FT: So, in a sense, you’re living the dream. You taught science —

LH: Well, it sounds like that, but…I really enjoy it, but I miss the interaction of coworkers. I like the freedom. I travel a lot. My kids are grown now. And now I’m back doing a lot of training which is like teaching except I’m not exhausted (laughs).

FT: And you don’t spend hours photocopying.

LH: I mean, it’s completely different to have a few classes to teach repeatedly. I would change them up a little bit, and you might teach a one day class or a five day class that you have all the time in between to prepare for that. And that’s completely different from trying to be on day after day.

FT: What I meant by “living the dream” is there are a lot of forensic teachers at the high school level who wish they were good enough to go pro. And I understand the grass is always greener on the other side, but a lot of people are going to look at such a move and say, “Man, I could do that.” But a lot of us would say we’d miss the kids despite all the hassles.

LH: And I do. I still take, and always have taken students I mentor, sometimes high school, sometimes college. I go in and speak at classes pretty often. So, I still try to stay pretty involved. I actually, now that I’m private, have thought it would be really fun to teach teachers about forensics.

FT: Now, I understand you and Jeanette will be teaching the Alaskan State Police this summer?

LH: I’ve only done one workshop with them, but it’s open to teachers and police personnel. There were both there in Montana [last summer].

FT: Looking back, when you were teaching high school, what do you wish you knew then that you know now about presenting science to students?

LH: Well, some things were reinforced. As a science teacher I never felt a lot of memorization was helpful. I mean, it’s more important to know how to use tools like the periodic table. And actually, the scientific method is something I probably breezed over, something that is there and is taken for granted. But it’s really an extremely important process, something I come back to not just when I’m doing research, but in the way I approach a case. So, that process has become much more important. I would have thought it was much more prevalent in my mind as a science teacher, but looking back I think now that I’ve applied it for so long that it’s something I would try to stress more, but not in terms of here’s the steps. But how can you take those steps and apply them to different problem solving scenarios.

FT: Did you teach forensics at the high school level?

LH: No, I’d never heard of it being offered when I was teaching. The first thing I got into was with that teacher I student taught with. During my first year at the crime lab I would go back and work with her in her chemistry classes to do some forensics.

FT: Interesting. Do you have any advice for educators who teach forensics?

LH: One thing I have gotten involved in that relates directly to education, is there are a lot of kids being turned out of colleges that think they’re qualified to work in a crime lab.

FT: Why is that?

LH: There’s not one job that’s like a CSI. There are different jobs that require different backgrounds and different training routes. So, most of the exciting running around interviewing people and solving crimes is the job of an investigator. If kids are interested in that then the path is one toward investigation in which a lot of these college programs like criminal justice, or what I’ll call soft science or social science, which is a better term, is a good background. But if they want to work in a crime lab, that is lab work. I like to sit and do meticulous work, I like to put jigsaw puzzles together, not running around solving crimes. And that work usually requires a science degree.

FT: Like biology or chemistry?

LH: Right, and sometimes even a master’s degree because it will get competitive. And that takes a real strong science background. But it’s a completely different job. I had a couple of heartbreaking conversations with recent college graduates that had criminal justice degrees, or had been to a university where they had something called a forensic science degree, and it didn’t have enough science. If you want to work in a lab it requires a lot of science at the college level. Whereas if you want to be an investigator or an FBI agent and that excitement, then that’s a great career path too. And that’s what I want to pass on to teachers, to really serve kids the best give them a real look at the different types of jobs in the world of forensic science, all the way from investigation to laboratory and help the kids kind of marry what their expectations are to what it is they like to do with how the actual job is done.

FT: We’ve interviewed other professionals in the field who have told me if you want to work in a crime lab you should go get a science degree because you know the science, you understand the science, you can do the science.

LH: That’s right.

FT: Whereas if you get a forensic science degree sometimes you may have trouble getting a job because a department might want to train you their way instead of having to undo what you were taught in college.

LH: That’s right. And you have to have, especially for a drug chemist or a DNA analyst, they have required courses that they need and those are not usually a part of a general forensic science degree.

FT: No, they wouldn’t be, would they?

LH: No.

FT: Like quantitative analysis.

LH: Exactly. Or all the instrumentation. They want genetics for the DNA. So, it’s really important to help kids look closely at all this. When they say they want to be a CSI, and you start asking them questions some are picturing more of the laboratory work and some are picturing more investigation.

FT: But what about what’s on TV? Are you telling me that people who do it all don’t exist, that TV somehow lies to us?

LH: (Laughs). They kind of wrap up several people’s jobs into one, and books do that too.

FT: Yes, yes they do.

LH: Artistic license, but when it comes to kids I picture this young woman’s face as she talked to me and this look of shock and disappointment that she’d been through a four year degree that she assumed qualified her in a laboratory. And it was a criminal justice degree.

FT: Yeah. No, I don’t see a lot of heavy-duty science in a criminal justice program.

LH: And it would be an excellent degree to move into police work which is an excellent career.

FT: Sure.

LH: Make sure you’re giving kids the right direction for their current expectations because they never know where they’re going to start college and you never know what they’re going to end up being interested in.

FT: Any other advice for today’s forensics teachers at the high school level?

LH: Pat yourself on the back because you’re the world’s unsung heroes. I miss the kids, but teachers are just great people. And I realize that many of my skills that have helped me be successful, to be able to explain things to juries, to be able to teach other people, these are all teacher skills. And teachers have those skills when and if they go to make career changes.

FT: And I imagine when you’re standing in front of 25-30 cops and they’re looking at you with expectations, you have no trouble launching into and delivering your material.

LH: No. It’s just all those things that come natural to teachers about how people learn, and being able to apply that and make it hands-on, and relating it. I get a lot of compliments about my teaching and they’re exactly the processes that teachers all across the country are doing every day.

Lesley Hammer

Imagine: you’re teaching high school chemistry when you get a call from the director of the state crime lab. He wants to hire you. It happened to Lesley Hammer, and she’s come a long way since. During a phone interview she explained what she misses about the classroom, how forensics teachers can better help their students, and how forensics isn’t like it is on TV.