Only on 10: A look inside the Rhode Island State Crime Laboratory

KINGSTON, R.I. (WJAR) — Nestled in Fogarty Hall on the campus of the University of Rhode Island, investigators are busy analyzing evidence. It’s part of the Rhode Island State Crime Laboratory, where police officers are also trained to investigate crime scenes.

“We don’t want them to be biased,” said Dennis Hilliard, who is the Director of the Rhode Island State Crime Laboratory. “We want them to keep in mind that they don’t need to convict someone or exonerate someone. They’re here to collect the evidence.”

The Rhode Island State Crime Lab has been around since the 1950s. Fingerprints, trace evidence, even gunshot residue, are processed there.

Hilliard said the lab has worked on about 900 cases and processed between 3,000 and 4,000 pieces of evidence per year. Mark Zabinski, a 22-year Cranston police veteran, analyzes fingerprints.

“It’s not like on television where the machine makes the identification and it blinks, match, match,” he told NBC 10 News on Friday.

Zabinski is also an instructor at the Crime Lab, teaching police officers how to properly document crime scenes.

“Footwear impression, tire tracks -- a lot of the evidence, you need proper photography techniques in order to identify those pieces of evidence,” he said.

Providence Police Detective James Clift has been a Bureau of Identification, or BCI, detective for almost 20 years. He also teaches officers from all over the state how to analyze crime scenes, showing them how to properly pull prints and collect and document evidence.

“I teach them to document and photograph and work with each scene, just like I do every day in the City of Providence,” Clift said.

Officers from every city and town in Rhode Island, as well as parts of Massachusetts and Connecticut, have been trained there.

“To collect, package and present that evidence for examination at a laboratory such as ours or at the health department, which does DNA and drug chemistry,” Hilliard said.

While the evidence is fake, instructors said the importance of getting it right is very real.

“My responsibility here is to the victim and the victim’s families to ensure that I’m going to get fully what the situation was here and I’m going to be able to document it completely,” Clift said.