Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and forensic investigation

DATE: Established as the Bureau of Investigation in 1908; renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935

IDENTIFICATION: Main law-enforcement agency of the US Department of Justice.

SIGNIFICANCE: The Federal Bureau of Investigation has long been the leading agency in the development and use of forensic science in crime investigation and prevention in the United States, if not the world.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) serves as both a federal criminal investigative body and a domestic intelligence organ within the United States. With over more than two hundred federal crimes, the FBI is the principal federal law-enforcement organization, with an annual budget of $11.4 million and about 35,000 employees as of 2024. In addition to its headquarters in Washington, DC, the FBI maintains 56 field offices and 350 resident agencies in the United States, as well as 60 foreign offices in US embassies around the globe.

The FBI has a broad mandate to protect the United States from terrorist attacks, foreign spying, cybercrime, public corruption at any level, violation of civil rights, organized crime, and any large-scale or otherwise significant violent crime. The agency also assists other federal, state, local, and international crime-fighting agencies and develops technologies to further these objectives. forensic science has played an important role throughout the history of the FBI, and the agency provides many forensic science services free to US state and local governments.

Early History

The legal authority for federal law enforcement developed very slowly in US history. Although one of the first four officials appointed to the cabinet of President George Washington in 1789 was the attorney general of the United States, the first attorney general, Edmund Randolph, was not given a department to run. The US Department of Justice was not created until 1870, and even then the department was not given many law-enforcement duties. Under the federal system, states and localities were expected to provide for basic law enforcement. The role of federal law enforcement changed gradually with the passage of various federal laws, such as the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. When violations of federal laws needed to be investigated, the US attorney general informally hired or borrowed personnel from other agencies.

By 1908, near the end of President Theodore Roosevelt’s term in office, various political and legal struggles made this situation untenable, and the Bureau of Investigation was created. This precursor to the FBI exhibited the same pattern of success and failure that later marked the FBI, but the scale of the agency’s activities was limited until J. Edgar Hoover was appointed BOI director in 1924.

Hoover, a consummate bureaucrat, led the agency for forty-eight years, until his death in 1972, and molded it into the paradoxical phenomenon it became. One of his first steps was to create the national registry of fingerprints, which became one of the hallmarks of forensic science, although the agency’s first laboratory was not established until 1932 (when the agency’s name was changed to the US Bureau of Investigation). The FBI crime lab started with basic forensic science analyses, such as firearms identification and the examination of disputed or questioned documents. Gradually, it became one of the best forensic facilities in the world, pioneering a wide range of forensic techniques, including the development of the use of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) analysis as a tool for identifying individuals.

Since 1935

In 1935, the U.S. Bureau of Investigation was renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Hoover undertook a campaign to make the FBI one of the most powerful federal law-enforcement agencies through an expansion of the agency’s responsibilities, but he took great care to ensure that the FBI did not overreach. Critics have charged that much of the positive public perception of the FBI in its early years came about as the result of Hoover’s intentional attack on “glamorous” crime problems that led to comparatively easy successes. In the 1920s, Hoover had pursued powerless left-wing radicals through such actions as the Palmer raids (named for A. Mitchell Palmer, the US attorney general who oversaw the raids). As FBI director, Hoover focused on bank robbers, a small part of national crime, creating the illusion of a 1930s crime wave that he could easily solve.

When World War II broke out, Hoover changed his focus to capturing the relatively small numbers of German and Japanese agents in the United States; the FBI caught enough of them that these activities were deemed a success. During the Cold War, Hoover again focused on left-wing radicals. At one time it was estimated that one-fifth of the members of the American Communist Party were “undercover” FBI agents. Despite all the agency’s public relations success, the FBI caught relatively few communist spies. The FBI compiled a successful statistical record, but the real crime fighting remained in the hands of local law enforcement.

This pattern of giving high priority to successful public relations seemed brilliant for a long time, but it also led to extensive criticism of Hoover and the FBI. By the end of Hoover’s career, the FBI’s reputation for success began to be a burden as the agency was asked to take on more and more responsibilities. With the passage of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, Hoover managed to avoid having the FBI carry the sole responsibility for the thankless job of fighting drug trafficking—that responsibility was placed primarily with the newly established Drug Enforcement Administration. In the same year, however, the passage of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act gave the FBI a prime role in fighting organized crime.

After Hoover’s death in 1972, those who succeeded him as FBI director were unable to stop the federal government from assigning the agency new responsibilities, and the FBI, some critics have asserted, became overextended. Throughout the Hoover era, forensic science was among the most glamorous of the FBI’s activities, and the FBI Laboratory Division represented one of the agency’s greatest successes. Each new responsibility assigned to the agency presented new opportunities for uses of forensic science, and the FBI’s forensic science capabilities were augmented even if the popular focus was on other aspects of the agency’s law-enforcement work.

The FBI and Forensic Science

The many different kinds of forensic science conducted at the FBI Laboratory reflect the full range of the uses of forensic science in the areas of law enforcement and intelligence gathering. The FBI lab performs a wide variety of chemical, biological, and technological services, which are offered to many state, local, and international agencies free of charge. The FBI also publishes a number of different kinds of reports on the lab’s work; both news media outlets and law-enforcement agencies rely on these reports for information on the state of forensics in law enforcement in the United States.

The FBI has achieved some great successes in using forensic science to solve crimes and support successful prosecutions. By analyzing the debris of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, FBI scientists were able to identify the vehicle used in the explosion within just a few hours of the attack; they achieved the same shortly after the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. In both cases, the gathered and analyzed by the FBI resulted in successful prosecutions of the perpetrators. The FBI investigation of the Unabomber case took longer, but ultimately the forensic evidence gathered resulted in the successful prosecution of Theodore Kaczynski.

Among the forensic science tools developed at the FBI is the use of criminal personality profiling—that is, the study of the psychological profiles associated with various types of criminals. Closely related to such is the creation of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) in 1983; the hostage negotiators on the HRT are trained to seek peaceful outcomes to a wide range of hostage situations.

Bibliography

"FBI Laboratory Publishes Major Handwriting Analysis Study." FBI News, 1 Aug. 2022, www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-laboratory-publishes-major-handwriting-analysis-study. Accessed 14 Aug. 2024.

James, Stuart H., and Jon J. Nordby, eds. Forensic Science: An Introduction to Scientific and Investigative Techniques. 2nd ed. Boca Raton, Fla.: CRC Press, 2005.

Kessler, Ronald. The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002.

Kopvatch, Sophia, Pamela Colloff, and Brett Murphy. "Is It Forensics or Is It Junk Science?" ProPublica, 31 Jan, 2023, www.propublica.org/article/understanding-junk-science-forensics-criminal-justice/ Accessed 14 Aug. 2024.

Powers, Richard Gid. Broken: The Troubled Past and Uncertain Future of the FBI. New York: Free Press, 2004.

Romerstein, Herbert, and Eric Breindel. The Verona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America’s Traitors. Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2001.

Theoharis, Athan G. The FBI and American Democracy: A Brief Critical History. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004.

Tonry, Michael, ed. The Handbook of Crime and Punishment. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Zegart, Amy B. Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007.