Procedure for Collecting Fingerprints and DNA from Officers at Crime Scenes

The Procedure for Collecting Fingerprints and DNA from Officers at Crime Scenes is a forensic safeguard that gives investigators a way to account for police officers’ own traces at crime scenes. In the investigation surrounding the Hävasshütte incident, Harry Hole uses that routine practice to propose checking Krongli’s DNA, while the evidence establishes the procedure’s purpose—not the result of any comparison.

Purpose and Operation

Fingerprints and DNA are taken from every police officer at a crime scene to prevent mistaken conclusions and confusion over whose traces are present. The procedure creates a reference point for interpreting forensic material: a match to an officer who attended the scene need not indicate that the officer committed the crime.

The account does not specify how samples are collected, where they are stored, or what formal rules govern access to them. Its stated function is narrower: accounting for officers’ fingerprints and DNA so that their presence does not create a false lead or become confused with evidence attributable to someone else.

Use in the Investigation

Harry Hole proposes checking Krongli’s DNA while considering whether Krongli might have assaulted Adele Vetlesen at Hävasshütte. Harry’s suggestion rests on Krongli’s having served as a police officer: he would likely have attended a crime scene at some point, where his fingerprints and DNA would have been recorded. Björn Holm understands the reasoning and agrees to check the register.

The proposal is a way to look for an existing reference record, not an assertion that Krongli’s DNA has been found at the relevant scene. The evidence describes the proposed check and the routine practice behind it, but does not report its result or establish that Krongli’s traces were recovered there.

Evidentiary Limits and Significance

The investigation’s interpretation of the Hävasshütte episode changes: Elias Skog had understood what he saw as a possible rape, but Harry later concludes that it was not a rape and that this distinction reveals the motive. That reversal makes the need to separate observation, inference, and forensic identification especially clear. The officer-sampling procedure can help identify whose traces might be present; it cannot, by itself, establish what happened or prove a person’s guilt.