• Journal of forensic and investigative science
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.11-30
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• 2006

The preliminary investigative activities by the police officer play a critical role in identifying the cause of death in unnatural death investigations. The failure to secure the crime scene leads to the destruction of significant evidence, which results in the difficulty or impossibility to identify the cause of death. In order to prevent this jeopardizing crucial evidence, and to identify the level of preliminary investigation on the scene, this research is conducted and analyzed with questionnaires of 300 police first responders and 100 detectives. As a result, it was disclosed that there is a possibility for first responders to fail to ensure scene security, scene observation, and canvass interviews. Besides, when medical personnel have no choice but to contaminate the crime scene in order to save lives, it is necessary for them to take photos and to take proper actions before they enter the scene. The importance of scene-control education cannot be emphasized enough in order to prevent media from entering and destroying the evidence. Through research of actual conditions of unnatural death cases which occurred in Kyongbook Province for last five years, the statistics regarding a few different types of death were analyzed as follows. Evidence that homicide, suicide, accidental death, and disaster deaths have increased year by year. Therefore, it is deemed necessary for the government to take multilateral policies to reduce them, and for police to reinforce their investigative skills. Further, the insufficient number of autopsy facilities and forensic pathologists, only 13% of the deceased (1,237 cases) have had an autopsy conducted to identify the cause of death for last five years. The other, 87.3% (8,496 cases) of the deceased, were handled through simple postmortem examination. The significance of this percentage is that there is still the possibility not revealing the cause of unjust deaths. Therefore, it is necessary to furnish police agency with the reasonable amount of funding for autopsies and maintaining enough forensic pathologists.