LANSING - Michigan State University and Michigan State Police Department (MSP), teamed up to host a homicide investigation training for new, current and aspiring detectives.

The MSP training division and MSU School of Criminal Justice hosted a homicide scene investigation training for law enforcement across the state. The training provided officers with knowledge, practice and hands on experience with different types of crime scenes.

“We work in conjunction with Michigan State University, the role players that we have out here today are from their criminal justice center, so they provide role players for us and what happens at the school the students, who some are detectives, current detectives and some are inspiring to be detectives. We have students, half of the class is Michigan State Police, the other half may consist of officers and deputies from other agencies,” said MSP Homicide School Trainer.

The homicide school training has high hopes of teaching new and old detectives better ways of investigating so that the number of unsolved cases can be lowered.

“We have a week long school, they learn about crime collection, DNA evidence, things like that, interviewing witnesses and then today we have our scenario day, where they’re required to come in as a group, they conduct interviews of the witnesses, they collect evidence, and then they try to figure out what kind of crime scene they have. Is it suicide or homicide?”

“This training really gives us some opportunity, some experience to learn how this is supposed to be done, so when we’re faced with a real-life situation, we’ve essentially been through it before, we’ve gone through the necessary steps before, so that when we’re doing it in real life, we do have experience to fall back on,” says a trainee from Lansing Police Department.

Students and detectives were able to become more diligent with their work and were even able to have a mock scene with media.