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A Futuristic Vision of Forensic Science

What will forensic science look like in the future? Forensic science has a promising future as new methods, technologies, and scientific advancements create new possibilities that have not yet been imagined. For example, while the discovery and utilization of DNA has transformed current-day forensic science, it will continue to do so as the detection technologies develop and our understanding of trace DNA transfer, persistence, prevalence, and recovery grows. New discoveries can create incremental evolutionary changes or revolutionary changes that will reshape the face of forensic science all together. We cannot predict the innovations and new technologies that will come to be, but we can certainly expect that they will happen (1) and that they will create new possibilities for forensic science. In this piece, we engage in a thought exercise to consider and present a view of what forensic science may look like in the future. It is intended to share ideas and provoke discussions about the direction forensic science may take in the future, what it can be, and what it will be capable of. This futuristic view takes into account that one of the most critical, challenging, and foundational aspects of forensic science is that it is a complex interdisciplinary field, with multiple stakeholders, drivers, and pressures (2). For this reason, the potential of new technologies and an increased evidence base to underpin crime reconstructions is clear. While we present here a vision of how these new capabilities may shape forensic science in the future, it is beyond the scope of this piece to provide technical details of how these developments may be implemented given that many of these technologies have yet to be created. Forensic science is often driven by specific issues and scandals (such as a miscarriage of justice), and resources are specifically deployed to address them (3). This means that forensic science is often reactive to “symptoms” that arise (4,5), rather than engaging in continuous and systematic proactive examination, research, and self-reflection as routine practice. In addition, forensic science frequently works within the framework that “every case is different,” which creates a fundamental tension between research seeking to develop generalizable theories and approaches, and professional practices in crime reconstruction. Therefore, taking a longer term view of the possibilities and potentially desirable directions of the future of forensic science is an important undertaking. As we consider a vision of the future, one of the basic challenges is that some forensic domains have developed within investigative practices (e.g., Ref. [6]) rather than first establishing the principles and foundations of a domain through scientific research. This has also led to many forensic domains having (comparatively) small amounts of data (e.g., Ref. [7]). Courts have readily accepted forensic science evidence (8), and given the complex ecosystem of forensic science with many interacting variables (9), the courts have allowed forensic science to flourish even without a truly holistic and coherent overview of crime reconstruction approaches, and a scientific research culture (10). As we look forward, one thing is almost certain, in the future datasets will be larger, our use and reliance on technology and laboratory information management systems will grow, and it will be possible to ensure that decision making is more transparent, which will transform narrow and anecdotal approaches. In this thought exercise to envision the future, timescale is a critical variable, because the further into the future we go, the more unknown and unpredictable factors there will be. However, it is possible to predict that forensic science in the future will take advantage of the development and utilization of emerging technologies, which will create new capacities to capture, produce, store, search, synthesize, visualize, and interrogate data. It is also clear that with all these new and exciting possibilities, new challenges and vulnerabilities also arise. Utopian fiction highlights the potential for this kind of data-rich world to transform society and human nature, but these new technologies and capabilities also create a world that faces very serious challenges (such as disclosure [11] and issues around ethics and privacy [12,13]), and there will certainly be new (as yet unknown) challenges. Taking a horizon scanning approach in considering forensic science in the future, it is important to consider how these new capabilities from technological advances and the ability to capture and process data might transform forensic science, and how this coming revolution can change and impact forensic science. Regardless of the specific details of these advances (some of which will make huge impacts, such as that made by DNA), it is possible to anticipate that future technologies will enable the creation of a platform that will manage and integrate forensic work within a simulator system that could be considered to be an “Integrative Reconstruction and Prediction Simulator” (IRPS). Such a unified platform will make it possible to integrate findings from a very broad range of physical and digital materials, situated within all the relevant contextual information in order to scientifically reconstruct a crime event, in a way that takes a truly holistic integrative approach to forensic science (14–16). In this thought exercise of taking a futuristic view of forensic science, it can be anticipated that it will be possible to simulate and model different scenarios and outcomes, similar to some extent to those in use in the domains of aviation and medicine (e.g., Ref. [17–19]). However, rather than having the human UCL Centre for the Forensic Sciences, University College London, London, U.K. UCL Department of Security and Crime Science, University College London, London, U.K. Corresponding author: Itiel E. Dror, Ph.D. E-mail: i.dror@ucl.ac.uk Received 17 Sept. 2019; accepted 8 Oct. 2019.