HOURS DUSTING A CAR FOR PRINTS WOULDN'T BE FAB TV, BUT IT'S REAL.

Byline: Josh Kleinbaum Staff Writer

A .22-caliber Winchester shotgun rests just above the rusted hot plate in a nook of the LAPD's crime lab where Danny Woo watches the vapors from a couple drops of Super Glue raise the image of a fingerprint on the handle of the gun.

``It's an exciting feeling,'' said Woo, a forensic specialist and one of the Los Angeles Police Department's best at lifting fingerprints. ``If a gun is tossed, it's nice to know who tossed it. You have a face to this gun. That's a very good feeling.''

This is CSI: Los Angeles, the reality version of big-city crimefighting. While scientists and forensic specialists have access to some of the whiz-bang gadgets familiar to viewers of television's crime dramas, they also have to rely on common household items and ancient computers to help the LAPD solve crimes.

Some 60 million viewers tune in each week to watch ``CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,'' ``CSI: Miami'' or ``CSI: New York.'' The CBS dramas feature Will Petersen, David Caruso and Gary Sinese leading specialized teams that collect evidence, analyze it in spacious and cutting-edge laboratories, then help apprehend and arrest the criminals.

The success of the ``CSI'' franchise and other modern-day cop dramas has raised expectations from viewers - and even police officers - about what can be accomplished in a police crime lab. Detectives expect results quickly. Juries expect every case to have solid scientific evidence that often isn't there.

``We get calls from detectives saying, 'I know you can do this because I saw it on `CSI.' '' said Steve Johnson, commander of the LAPD's Scientific Investigations Division - the department's version of CSI.

`` `CSI' is good television. We're not quite as good as they are. We don't solve two cases in an hour.''

Fact-finders

Nearly all of the 314 employees in the Scientific Investigations Divisions are civilians, with degrees in biology, chemistry or criminal justice.

They do not make arrests or drive Hummers. They don't work across the hall from detectives who storm in demanding results. In fact, they try to keep distance between themselves and the detectives with whom they work.

``We're just objective fact-finders,'' said Diego Tabares, a forensic print specialist. ``We don't know whose print it is. We want to remain as neutral and objective as possible.''

Johnson has a sense of humor about the television shows.

He asked the head of the LAPD's motor pool if he could have a Hummer like the one driven by Lt. Horatio Caine, Caruso's character on ``CSI: Miami'' (The request was denied - he's stuck with his Ford Crown Victoria.)

And he's grateful that the television show makes it much easier to explain to people what he does for a living.

In real life, the work is tedious. Car searches are usually the worst - the stench of a car that's been lived in can be overwhelming. And criminalists have to spend hours inside the vehicle, going over every inch.

Lifting fingerprints at a crime scene takes hours of searching and dusting. Just scanning the print into the computer takes five minutes. The computer database will find possible matches, but the LAPD's analyst must make the comparison manually, studying the whorls and lines for a match.

``On the `CSI' television shows, the computer does all the work for you,'' Tabares said. ``In reality, you have to do the work for the computer.''

Johnson likes to joke about one `CSI' episode, in which an analyst scanned a smudged print into a computer. Within seconds, the computer cleaned up the print, found a match and displayed a picture of the suspect.

``I thought, 'I want to buy one of those,' '' Johnson said.

L.A.'s labs

Los Angeles' SID unit is spread among five offices throughout the city.

The main lab is housed at Piper Technical Center, an old warehouse in downtown Los Angeles - and a long haul from any of the LAPD's stations. There, criminalists with degrees in biology or chemistry perform shoe print matches, trace analyses, narcotics identification and DNA comparisons (which takes weeks, not a few hours as depicted on TV).

A high-tech machine called a gas chromatography/mass spectrometer - GC/MS for short - determines the chemical makeup of drugs, urine and other substances.

A second lab - where the fingerprint unit, photographers and polygraph experts work - is at Parker Center, although workers are spread out on different floors. A smaller version of that lab is located in Van Nuys.

A firearms lab is adjacent to the Northeast Community Police Station, near Glendale, and a latent prints lab is in Westchester.

Woo works in a converted cafeteria on the eighth floor of Parker Center - cramped, narrow quarters. Some tests are performed in a room that used to be a freezer.

In that former cafeteria, Woo has lifted fingerprints off of duct tape pulled from the mouth of a rape victim, a plastic bag used to wrap the bodies of three murder victims and a laptop computer stolen from actor Robert Blake's defense attorney.

He never got the chance to test the famous leather glove from the O.J. Simpson murder case - the lining was porous and would not hold prints.

``We didn't want to further contaminate it,'' Woo said.

The LAPD's crime lab has had remarkable success without the high-tech advances shown on television, providing key evidence in homicides, robberies and other cases. Even when the evidence is inadmissible in court, such as the results of a polygraph exam, it can provide the building blocks for a case.

A few floors below where Woo searches for prints, Ervin Youngblood, a polygraph examiner, monitors blood pressure, respiratory patterns and skin response of criminal suspects and would-be cops.

Most of the people given polygraphs by the LAPD are applicants or officers transferring into a sensitive division. But the department polygraphs about two criminal suspects each day, and nobody in the department is better at it than Youngblood.

Criminal suspects frequently confess to Youngblood before he even hooks them up to the polygraph.

That's what happened with Efren Saldivar, a respiratory therapist at Glendale Adventist Hospital who became known as the Angel of Death. In Youngblood's polygraph room, Saldivar confessed to killing hundreds of patients. In 2002, Saldivar was sentenced to six consecutive life sentences for killing six of those patients.

``Once we began the interview, he felt he couldn't beat the poly,'' Youngblood said. ``He admitted his part before he was connected to the poly. We stopped counting at 200.

``That night, there was only one detective left in the building. When I walked out of the room, the guy said, 'I can't believe what I just heard.' ''

Occasionally, LAPD crime lab workers get credit for their contributions to a case. Most of the time, though, they're the anonymous guys in the background, putting yellow labels by each gun shell at a crime scene, while the detectives or the brass get the attention.

``The detectives always take credit for solving the case,'' Johnson said. ``We let them take the credit. It's OK.''

Josh Kleinbaum, [phone]

josh.kleinbaum(at)dailynews.com

CAPTION(S):

3 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color) Caron Frenkel, a forensic print specialist, dusts a stolen Hummer for fingerprints at a Canoga Park tow yard. Searching and dusting cars can take hours, and experts from the Scientific Investigations Division say the work is tedious.

(2 -- color) Senior Forensic Print Specialist Daniel Woo says finding prints on a piece of evidence, such as the ones on this cigarette examined at the Chemical Processing Detail at Parker Center, is ``an exciting feeling.''

(3 -- color) Specialists work with evidence in the Narcotics Lab as part of LAPD's Scientific Investigations Division.

Andy Holzman/Staff Photographer