Speaker:

Jody M. Wolf, PhD
Assistant Director of Technical Services
Phoenix Police Department

Target Audience:

- Interdisciplinary

Knowledge Level Required:

- Basic

Abstract

Standards play a critical role in elevating and harmonizing forensic practice. Through the establishment and codification of minimum requirements, best practices, and scientifically sound methods in consensus-based standards, the processes and procedures implemented across forensic service providers (FSPs) can be brought into greater alignment and trust with public consumers of forensic outputs can be established at a higher level.

The global forensic apparatus has been developing, publishing, and implementing standards for well over forty years. Historically, volunteers at the national and international levels have dedicated a great deal of time and energy to these efforts, often with very little recognition for the documents they produce.

For various reasons, a new emphasis has been placed on the importance of forensic science standards, and a deluge of documents has been published over the last ten years. This accelerated pace of document delivery has overwhelmed FSPs because the time and resources required to evaluate and consider this mountain of information tend to be scarce.

As part of this process, the ISO Technical Committee 272 (TC 272) and the affiliated United States Technical Advisory Group (US TAG) have been working diligently to develop and publish international forensic standards with the goals of increasing the scientific rigor of forensic practice and better harmonization of these activities from a global perspective. The primary product of these efforts is the ISO 20143 series of forensic science standards.

Although ISO 21043 Parts 1 (Vocabulary) and 2 (Recognition, recording, collecting, transport and storage of items) had been previously published, Parts 3 (Analysis), 4 (Interpretation), and 5

(Reporting) were published in June 2025 and are now available for public consumption.

This webinar (part 1 in a five-part series) will introduce attendees to the operations of the US TAG and TC 272 with the goal of framing how the ISO 21043 series of standards was developed and providing a general overview of where these standards fit into the forensic operational environment. Later parts of this series will address each standard in further detail, providing background on their applicability and addressing questions from potential implementers.

The overall goal of this webinar series is to gradually introduce forensic service providers to these documents and to answer any questions they may have. In this manner, we can navigate the flood of documents together and help you decide if and where these standards fit into the dry land of your operations.