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Here's a link to a law review on fire investigation and forensic science. I've heard several times in the last 5+ years about how public fire investigation units need to have bifurcated roles to limit examiner bias. I've seen numerous calls for proficiency testing and the development of error rates in fire investigations. However, with all of these demands, nobody has come up with a solution as far as how to implement these changes.
So... for the sake of discussion, how could these changes be made? I understand the bifurcation of roles, but for fire department that only has one investigator per shift, there doesn't seem like a way to do this without adding more personnel.
Proficiency testing is tricky as well. What are we testing? The ability to discern a pattern? The conclusions generated from the examination of that pattern? Some things may be more conducive to testing than others.
And what data set are we going to base our error rates on? How do you generate an error rate from a singular event?
Just asking all of these questions for the sake of discussion. I've heard calls for these changes repeatedly, and yet nobody has proposed how to implement them. Hoping this could generate some movement in the right direction.