Murder Cop: A Profile of Vernon J. Geberth
Baptism by Fire
Geberth was often frustrated over the lack of training for New York City detectives.� After he was assigned to a precinct detective squad, he was called to his first murder scene.� "The best that I could come up with at the time," he recalls, "was that the person was dead.� It was a drug-related shooting in an alleyway in West Harlem, and basically there was no forensics at all."� The procedure for solving such crimes at the time was to pay or pressure informants to give up some leads.� Geberth was frustrated.
"That's why, when I came to the Seventh Homicide Zone, I said, 'There's got to be a better way. There has got to be more to this than getting confessions and rounding up the local suspects.'"� Seeking a more sophisticated approach, he did his own research and even attended the FBI's Academy and took an in-depth course on forensics.� Yet when he returned to New York to apply some of these procedures, he faced hostility.

"When I would tell the crime-scene people what I wanted done, they must have learned a new word. 'Can't do it,' they'd say.�� 'Why not?' I'd ask.� 'It's carcinogenic.' So I'd tell them, 'It's only carcinogenic if you drink it. Now do what I said.' So that's how it started."
� Despite attempts to maintain the undisciplined status quo, the homicide investigators eventually adopted better methods.� In a place like New York, a reliable procedure was badly needed, especially when the specialized teams were re-organized.� Geberth once again encountered an attitude that, to him, was unacceptable in this line of work.
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