On November 28th 2005, I wrote this article.

I’m astonished. In all my years of being a tedious pundit, I’ve never, not once, seen CSI: Miami approach any level of reality. Until I read this article on BBC News.

Modern computers have enabled Horatio Caine to automate many daily tasks in his job as head of Miami’s crime lab.

I beat on CSI a lot, I know, mainly CSI: Miami. That’s because it’s easy.

Let me put it another way: if the CSI writers can get away with doing fuck all research, and indulge in lazy writing, then so can I. To further extend this comparison, if millions of people around the world enjoy CSI despite those failings, I too will enjoy the same success. This is watertight logic, and if you think you have found a discrepency, you haven’t. The only discrepency is in your face.

Here’s how to solve a crime in CSI land.
1) Go to the crime scene. Find three pieces of evidence: blood (some of it will be someone else’s), a huge chunk of dried skin, and a piece of soil.
2) Return to crime lab. Immediately put the soil through a battery of tests. It will have some unique properties that can only be found in one single area in all of the US.
3) Go to this area, find someone who works there. Accuse them of the crime immediately when you find that the flap of skin at the crime scene belongs to them.
4) The person will explain that they have a lot of loose skin, and some of it probably dropped off when you went round to the house to borrow a cup of sugar. This person will also point you in the direction of your next suspect.
5) Locate next suspect. Accuse suspect of the crime. Suspect will turn out to have a watertight alibi, and the blood will not be his. He will mention another person. This will be the person who committed the crime.
6) Find this person. Accuse them of the crime. This person will deny it, brimming with self-assurance. Explain that it was their blood at the crime scene. Come up with a ridiculous and convoluted explanation for how the suspect got their own blood at the crime scene.
7) The suspect will immediately confess, explaining why he comitted the crime.
 Case closed. Sunglasses.

The procedure for CSI: Miami differs in a few details from the standard CSI practice. I will outline the Miami procedure below:
1) Do not go to the crime scene. Your boss Horatio Cain is already at the crime scene. He was there within 0.04 microseconds of the crime being committed. He will collect no evidence, but will correctly notice anything and everything relevant to the crime.
2) Horatio solves crime within 0.09 microseconds of arriving on the scene. Continue waiting at the lab for Horatio to return.
3) Upon Horatio’s return, do not ask him for the solution. He will want to drip feed you information so that work appears to be done. Humour him. This is a kind act by Horatio, since it keeps everyone in the department employed. If it ever became known that he is a one-man crime-busting machine, you would be unemployed.
4) Crime is considered solved when Horatio has decided that you have done enough work to keep up the illusion of being useful.

At some point between points 3 and 4 it is considered standard operating procedure for Horatio to do any of the following:
-Molest a member of CSI staff using only his voice
-Molest a member of CSI staff using conventional molestation techniques
-Shoot someone (not necessarily a member of CSI staff)
-Remove his sunglasses and then put them back on eighteen times a second
-Stand by while other CSI staff members accuse people of the crime, hoping to get one up on Horatio by solving it without him telling them
-Drive a car through an exploding building
-Fight a tidal wave using his fists

Now you know how to solve crimes like the pros!

It is very important to be able to seperate actual fact from ‘pretend’ fact.

To be more precise, it is very important that people learn the skill of seperating fact from CSI: Miami’s version of fact.

Watching an episode last week, I was interested to see that it began rather dramatically with a plane crash. In the time it took for the credits to roll, Horatio was on the scene. The first order of business for Horatio, as always, was to immediately start talking so that he could creep everyone out with his convicted-stalker voice.

With this task accomplished, he began to interview the pilot who was being stretchered onto an ambulance. Within ten seconds, Horatio had deduced that the man had been blinded by a laser, which had made him crash the plane. You may think I am exaggerating, but I’m not.

So, he heads back to the CSI lab and gets some of his staff to render up some CGI to show where on the ground the laser may have come from. Apparently, CSI labs tend to employ as many CGI artists as actual investigators.

They discover that one of the houses in the area is owned by a man who has been complaining about planes flying over his neighbourhood. So, off Horatio trots to the gentleman’s house.

Within 15 seconds of getting in the door, he sees a laser pointer on a table and accuses the man of pointing it at the pilot to blind him and make him crash the plane.

Now, I’m going to clarify this for you, because you may have, quite reasonably, assumed that the man burst into the cockpit and blinded the pilot with the pointer, or something. No, you see, this man was notin the cockpit. He wasn’t even on the plane.

You know when CSI does the zoomy flashy visuals to illustrate a crime? They showed us one here. The man standing on the ground, holding his pen-sized laser pointer, and shining it at a plane roughly a mile above him. The view then zooms along the beam up to the plane and right into the pilot’s eye.

Several thoughts present themselves, but I won’t go through them all, because none of them matter in light of the following:

If someone was just standing in a field a mile away, I couldn’t get him in the eye with a laser pointer. That’s without him being in a moving aircraft, behind tinted glass that’s designed to block out sunlight. I couldn’t even aim a laser pointer into someone’s eye from across the road.

There’s nothing wrong with a bit of artistic license, but come on! If it was at all possible to bring down aircraft with just hand-aimed laser pointers, terrorists would be buying them up by the truckload. Funnily enough, though, those crazy terrorists seem to prefer something called SURFACE TO AIR MISSILES. Now, I’m assuming there’s a pretty large price differential between one laser pointer and one SAM launcher plus ammunition. Even when you factor in spare batteries for the laser pointer. Heck, you could factor in ten years worth of batteries for the laser pointer, and still only scratch the surface of the cost of the aforementioned military hardware. With that in mind, I’m quite sure that those cost-conscious terrorists know that they’re spending their money on proven technology.

A recurring pattern in CSI: Miami is that of Horatio solving all crimes ever. His team are merely there to do the donkey work, while he swans between labs nodding and creeping the staff out with his voice. They look all puzzled by their lab results until Horatio points out the solution effortlessly. There are two possible explanations.

1) Horatio has simply trained himself to be amazing at solving everything, so that he doesn’t have to work late and can spend his evenings using his voice for it’s main purpose: creeping people out in dark alleyways and stalking beautiful women.

or

2) Horatio is an embittered ex-cop who merely fantasises that he’s far superior to everyone and fixes all problems. CSI: Miami is simply a documentary of these musings. THIS IS THE ONLY WAY THAT A PLANE BEING BROUGHT DOWN BY A LASER POINTER CAN BE EXPLAINED.

Also, Horatio is ginger, much to my amusement.