Crime and Document
At the scene of a crime, some cops examine their weapons. But not Tyronne Hancock. He checks his film, his filters and his $15,000 infrared scope.

On a Friday night when a 737 comes in over the radio, Tyronne Hancock knows it’s time for him to pack his gear and head out.

Photos by Katie Murray

Tonight the call is for gunshots fired at a housing project on the north side of town. The sun is just beginning to set when Hancock arrives. In the small community of houses, kids whiz by on scooters. Old folks stretch out on lawn chairs in front of the two-story family units. An ice-cream truck tinkles its melody. A few yards from the playground where children swing from the monkey bars, an abandoned McDonald’s bag and half-finished Coke marks the area where a man has been shot and wounded. His dinner sits in an eerie still life near the curb.

As New Jersey’s largest urban center, Newark no longer holds the dubious title of “stolen car capital of the country.” But criminal activity still flourishes, putting it on the map as the 12th most dangerous city in America (much improved since 1996, when it ranked second). And of all of the violent crimes committed in the city each year, if they occurred between the hours of 5 p.m. and 1 a.m., chances are 31-year-old Newark Identification Officer Hancock has photographed them.

“I’ve seen it all,” he begins, listing the shootings, robberies, carjackings, motor

vehicle fatalities, sexual assaults and accidents whose aftermath he’s documented. “If it’s DOA, they leave the body there for me to photograph” Otherwise, his work is to preserve and record the scene of the crime for further investigation.

As a member of Crime Scene Unit 645 in the Newark Police Department, his job is not only to collect and log evidence, retrieve and match fingerprints, map and measure the area, but also to document the incident on film. He is responsible for photographing the scene itself, the position of the evidence and, most important, if the crime results in death, the condition of the victim and the severity of the wounds.

The snapshots are used by investigators, detectives and, ultimately, the courts. The

purpose of these pictures is to bring the members of the jury to the crime scene. The photographs are important not only in reconstructing the events, but for their emotional impact on the jury, which can be invaluable to prosecutors at trial.

Typically, the forensic photographer is first on the scene after the reporting officer. Tonight, a few detectives have beat Hancock to the housing project. They are shuffling around in the grass, their eyes glued to the ground, searching for spent bullet casings in the area. An ambulance has already shuttled the victim off to the hospital to treat the bullet wound in his leg. When Hancock sets down his clipboard and briefcase, the detectives scatter and he goes to work.

Before he breaks out his camera, he surveys the location. Walking through it backward, then forward, he takes measurements, and sketches a rough diagram of the area.

Armed with a Nikon N80, Hancock covers the scene in wide, medium and close-up shots, carefully panning the crime scene and making sure that the angles from which he shoots don’t distort the subject. If evidence (or fingerprints) had been recovered, he’d shoot those too. His briefcase is packed with all sorts of police toys—a $15,000 Krimesite scope, which uses an infra-red frequency to bring out a fluorescent green color to the body oils and aids in the detection of fingerprints. There is an assortment of filters: 80As, 82Bs, FLDs, and neutral density for various lighting conditions, and filters that work in conjunction with Luminol, the chemical that reacts upon contact with blood, semen and saliva at the crime scene. Though he doesn’t use any tonight, all assist him in the photographic reconstruction of the events that occurred.

“The pictures are supposed to talk,” he says as he snaps away. “The pictures are supposed to tell everything. It’s like putting a map together of what happened.” He logs the contents of the rolls of film on his report, and then it’s back to the station.

The negatives will then travel to the police photo lab to be processed. They remain in the crime scene investigators’ files until prints are needed for trial, or if a detective requests them to review his case. Hancock is often called into court to vouch for the authenticity of the images.

Police photography has come a long way from its origins in 1841, when medium-format cameras were the state of the art. But it has been slow to make the changeover into digital. At present, in New Jersey at least, digital photography is not accepted by the courts for major crimes scenes because digital images are too readily manipulated. Of course, the images may be blown up (often to almost mural proportions) and judiciously cropped before they are displayed to a jury.

While pulling together the paperwork for his report, Hancock lights a cigarette and waits for the next call. It’s a slow Friday night, and he’s relieved. He gets, on average, four to six calls a shift, though last night, one fatal car accident kept him out until 5 a.m. painstakingly shooting four rolls of pictures. “It was one of the worst I’ve seen,” he admits. By 7:30 this evening, he’s only been out once, but warns that “things usually kick off by 8” and continue steadily until “the hot zone,” the ten minutes between 12:35 and 12:45 a.m. where the calls seem to pile up one after another. No one can say why—maybe that’s when the bars really get going, the alcohol kicks in and the fights start—but Hancock rarely has the opportunity to punch out by 1 a.m.

Born and bred in Newark, where he still resides, Hancock was sidelined by a shoulder injury in high school, which killed his aspirations for a professional baseball career. He worked several years in the electronics and auto industries before he decided to make good on his childhood interest in police work. He has been with the department for a little over five years. Handsome and soft-spoken, he refers often to his young daughter, whom he sometimes checks up on when he is in the neighborhood. His easy way with children extends to the ones on the scenes of the crimes he visits. His jokes and his patience with local kids—even stopping to tie shoes—is in striking contrast to the reporting officers who are all business around bystanders.

At the New Jersey State Police Academy, Hancock enrolled in the standard six-week course for investigation officers, studying the handling of evidence and fingerprint identification. He also took the required two weeks of photography basics, covering film, camera and shutter choices, as well as the strategies for dealing with the problems that plague the crime scene photographer the most. Bad weather is one. Fog, rain and cold weather can wreak havoc on the camera, batteries, lenses and the images themselves. Larger crime scenes, some several blocks long, can be intimidating, so these are tackled by Hancock in pieces. He describes a particularly brutal car accident in which “debris flew everywhere” that took him three hours to shoot “covering every little bit.”

Some forensic veterans have griped that two weeks of photography is not sufficient—that the craft of forensic photography needs to be refined with more specific instruction. As a result, some investigators opt for more specialized education. EPIC, the nonprofit Evidence Photographer’s International Council <www.epic-photo.org> oversees a rigorous board-certified program in forensic photography. In the past they’ve offered seminars on lighting techniques for photographing gunshot wounds, fire inspection and arson investigation, and instruction on “hazmat” or hazardous materials photography.

Hancock brushes off any suggestion that his job takes a psychological toll. After five years of photographing shootings, sexual assaults, auto fatalities, robberies and dead body after dead body, he says, “It gets tough sometimes, but I take everything I do on this job as an experience, and I leave work at work, and home at home.” And while photography is a large part of his daily life, he doesn’t pick up a camera in his off-hours, not even on vacation: “It reminds me of working,” he laughs.

While he may not love the camera, the camera certainly loves him. Not long ago, Hancock caught the eye of Jack Lechner, who co-produced the recent “Shots in the Dark” documentary for Court TV as a companion to the book of the same name, a history of crime photography by photo historian Gail Buckland and Harold Evans.

For the project, which aired in October, Lechner’s crew profiled Hancock, collecting hundreds of hours of tape of Hancock at work, but like the author of this article, legally he was restricted in what details he was able to show.

“We’ve carefully worked around that,” says Lechner. “[In the documentary] you’re going with Tyronne up to the edge of what he does, but it’s really only through the power of suggestion that you get a sense of what he actually sees.”

And what do you see? Lovers of film noir may be disappointed in the resulting snapshots from the forensic photographer. Police photography itself is about as far from the melodramatic tabloid images of Weegee as one can get. They’re relentless, almost mundane catalogues of bits of evidence, angle after angle of bodies awkwardly sprawled, and not a one framed or lit with flair. In describing police photography, Buckland says: “This is not pretty work. There is no room for self- expression, or art, or interpretation here. We’re talking about evidence. I think that one of the last frontiers of the photograph as witness is truly in forensics.”

The documentary, like Buckland’s book, takes pains to distinguish between tabloid and forensic photography. Here they contrast Hancock’s work with the work of New York’s Daily News photographer Todd Maisel. With his backward police hat (which helps him sneak on location), Maisel scurries around town shooting tabloid images in that familiar guerrilla style.

“The tabloids deal with what is perceived of as news,” says Buckland describing the differences in the visual vocabulary of the police photograph and the tabloid image. “But with forensics, whether it is newsworthy or not, everything has to be photographed. It is part of the police record.”

“Todd Maisel and Tyronne make a very striking contrast,” continues Lechner. “Tyronne is doing very serious weighty work that takes a toll on him. It’s not a pleasant job. He feels a sense of duty and is very aware that he is actually trying to bring a little justice to the world.”

“He is sort of the moral center of our film. It’s very easy for this material to get away from the viewer, and to focus on the exploitive and the titillating. And I think Tyronne helps to remind us that there are real people’s lives at stake here. That crime photography is ultimately very serious business. And I think that’s because he takes it very, very seriously.”

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