Blood Splatter Analyst

Violent crimes often leave behind a big red mess. The job of a Blood Splatter Analyst is to read the blood at crime scenes as if it’s ink on a page. Whether it’s a trace amount — a fleck or spot, for instance — or a substantial sum, it’s the Blood Splatter Analyst’s job to examine the evidence to determine if a crime has occurred and, if so, what happened.

If you’re a Blood Splatter Analyst, you’re a type of Crime Lab Analyst. You accomplish your work through a process known as bloodstain pattern analysis (BPA), which uses a combination of biology, chemistry, mathematics, and physics to determine, based on bloodstain shapes, sizes, and patterns: the movement, direction, and position of victims while they were shedding blood, as well as after; the weapon or object that caused the bloodshed; bloodstains’ area of origin; the number of impacts during an incident; and the sequence of events during a crime.

Common tasks include photographing evidence; using swabs and ultraviolet light to detect and collect it; and using computer programs, notes, and sketches to analyze it.

Some people read palms to predict the future. You, however, read bloodstains to figure out the past, which helps Detectives solve crimes, and juries convict the people who commit them.