Deep Futures

Deep Futures Episode 5: Crime - Raychelle Burks

Raychelle Burks: So back in the day, and we're talking way back, people were totally killing each other. And that was like different from what you're told is like, “These new times are a hellscape.” And I was like, "I don't think so, friend." So... [Laughs]

Annalee: Humans really love to do crimes. But you know what we love just as much? The detectives who solve them. Personally I’ve always been a fan of Veronica Mars. She’s an ultra-competent high school detective, who uses her intelligence and quick wit to solve crimes for underdogs. When Veronica’s best friend is murdered and the cops arrest the wrong guy, Veronica takes down the rich movie star who’s responsible. That’s because Veronica doesn’t care how powerful you are—she’ll get you if you’re guilty.

Veronica Mars VO: “We were just in the neighborhood, thought we’d drop by, solve a murder case for you.”

Annalee: We have an endless appetite for crime stories, whether they star fictional justice seekers like Veronica Mars—or real-life gumshoes.

Annalee: But detectives are only as good as their tools. Back in the old days, they had to sneak into parties to get intel, or rely on footprints to track their suspects. Now we have data trails on mobile phones and chemical tests that can uncover latent fingerprints or traces of poison. The question is, where will our crime-solving tools go next?

Annalee: Hey, I’m Annalee Newitz. In this episode of Deep Futures, we’re talking to someone who will give us a clue. She’s a forensic chemist who’s going to solve a murder with me and show us how our current law enforcement system is undermined by bias. If we want to fix it in the future, we need to think outside the lab.

Raychelle: My name is Dr. Raychelle Burks. I am an analytical chemist and a chemistry professor—and a supervillain hopeful [Evil Laugh].

Annalee: Meet Raychelle. She’s a chemistry professor who designs tools that help detectives solve crimes. She’s talked about her work in documentary films, on the Science Channel, and in 2020, she won the American Chemical Society’s Grady-Stack Award for teaching the public about science. But before she became a professor, she worked in a forensics lab. And she spends a lot of time thinking about … murder: not just how it’s done, but who’s powerful enough to get away with it.

Raychelle: How do you get away with the perfect murder? Well, it really helps if you're literally in charge of any entity that would conceivably even think to step to you. Right?

Annalee: There was one well-connected family in particular that captured young Raychelle’s attention and got her hooked on using chemistry as a crime fighting tool:

Raychelle: Really early on, I remember reading about the Borgias, and … you're just like, “These people...this is like a serial killing family, what is going on? And there were popes?!”

Annalee: The Borgias were an infamous noble family who basically poisoned their way to power in 15th-century Italy. Cardinals, nobles and at least one pope had an unfortunate tendency to die just after being invited to dine at the House of Borgia.

Raychelle: From the chemistry angle, what got me is they’re like, "Oh, we're pretty sure it's arsenic.” Right? But they were like, “There could still be a chance that this doesn't quite go the way we want it to.” So they were like, "I see your arsenic, again, and I raise you!” So they came up with their own kind of poison.

Annalee: The Borgias’ signature poison was called Cantarella. For centuries, its ingredients were largely a mystery, but modern toxicologists now suspect it was made by killing a pig with arsenic…

Raychelle: So they put it in a pig carcass …

Annalee: ...letting it rot…

Raychelle: we got to really let it marinate in there…

Annalee: And then collecting fluids from the dead animal…

Raychelle: and let it fester.

Annalee: The whole mess could be powdered and slipped into someone’s wine or food. The science fascinated Raychelle—and so did the power dynamics.

Raychelle: The chemistry but also the idea who these people were. As a kid, I was like, “scandal! This is better than General Hospital and Dynasty together.” [Laughs] Even hundreds of years later, it still consumes modern-day scientists trying to figure out how people got sick after eating with these folks. And that part of putting these little nuggets from several different sources together, that's also what I love about analytical chemistry is the detective work that's involved.

Annalee: So when she grew up, she decided to become a chemistry detective herself. Raychelle can’t talk about the cases she worked on ten years ago as a forensic analyst at a crime lab in the Pacific Northwest. But her forensics job was sort of like a real-life version of the researchers on the show Bones.

Bones VO: “If I can figure out the exact alloy of aluminum, then maybe I could … maybe we could …” “We’re gonna catch him, okay? I promise you.”

Annalee: But of course real life is nothing like what we see on TV. It’s a lot...geekier.

Raychelle: We don't have sunglasses that cool. And our footwear is much more functional and yet also comfortable. I'm not running after any of these crooks in the streets. [Laughs] There's a reason why I'm a chemist! I’m more of like the action hero that’s like, “I can make you a bar chart.” [Laughs]

Annalee: On shows like CSI and Bones, the forensics expert takes one look at the evidence, swabs it with something, and says, “Yep, here’s our bad guy.” In real life, many tests take weeks to come back. Technical limitations mean stuff has to be sent out to a lab instead of tested on the spot, and government bureaucracy slows everything down even more.

Raychelle: You’re one cog in the wheel. And by the time you might get a case as a forensic analyst, they might already have somebody arrested and charged, you know? And so there's a real time disconnect.

Annalee: Now that Raychelle works in academia, she’s developing gadgets to make this kind of investigative work faster, more portable and more accurate. Her advancements could make it easier for the crime-solvers of the future to catch bad guys. Specifically, she works on improving color tests, which can indicate the presence of chemicals quickly, right at the crime scene. Just like on TV.

Annalee: One of the most common color tests is called the Marquis Reagent: it can indicate dozens of substances. Investigators chip off a bit of the suspicious substance, put it into a bag with their chemical reagent, and the substance changes color. Each color maps to a different chemical. At least, it’s supposed to.

Raychelle: If it interacts with, say, heroin or codeine, morphine, some people will describe it anywhere between pink, red, purple, somewhere in that magenta, burgundy. It depends on how the person describes it. Sometimes we’re not good at describing different colors and we all have different color visual acuity.

Annalee: So heroin turns this test pink. The problem is that aspirin also turns a pinkish color. And so do a lot of other substances. Being able to tell aspirin-pink from heroin-pink can mean the difference between a suspect going to prison and going home. So Raychelle helped to design an app that takes the guesswork out of it by making those color identifications a lot more accurate.

Raychelle: That’s kind of one big area I work on because when they go wrong, you put real people at risk. And I think about that every moment of every day I do this type of work. You just want to do better. I think that's one of the reasons I got into science.

Annalee: Raychelle might have the mind of a supervillain but she’s got the heart of a superhero. Protecting the innocent is just as important to her as finding the guilty. She’s worried about all the innocent people sent to prison based on faulty crime scene tests.

Fox News Atlanta VO: “Tonight we have a Fox 5 i-team exclusive, innocent Georgians wind up in jail for weeks because a failed test for drugs comes back positive. But ultimately it wound up being wrong….”

Annalee: In 2016, ProPublica reported that data from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement revealed that 21 percent of substances that police listed as methamphetamine were actually—not meth.

Annalee: More importantly, half of those false positives were not even illegal drugs at all. And that’s just in one state. In 2019, an estimated 1.35 million people are arrested on low-level drug charges. That means thousands of people might have gone to jail—for aspirin. Raychelle wants to fix that. Raychelle: We're going to be able to get through more casework better and faster because the technology will not be a limitation. The limitation might still be us.

Annalee: That limitation she’s talking about? It’s human bias—and the fact that the criminal justice system isn’t always just. Take sexual assault kits, for example. A sexual assault kit, also known as a rape kit, is a widely accepted, standardized test that forensics labs use to track down rapists by analyzing hair, blood, semen, and other bits of evidence left on the victim’s body. But there’s a huge backlog of these kits—hundreds of thousands of them have just never been tested.

Full Frontal with Samantha Bee VO: “There are an estimated 400,000 rape kits just sitting in evidence rooms from across the country that have NEVER been tested for DNA samples, and those kits can be used to convict or acquit suspected rapists.”

Annalee: Detectives have plenty of evidence, labs have all the tools they need to solve the crime, but the tests aren’t getting run. The science is there, but the systems aren’t. You can’t fix a problem like that with an app. Raychelle: It's not just about, “Oh, we didn't have enough analysts, dedicated equipment, time.” There's also the elephant in the room that sometimes folks don’t want to talk about, which is rape culture, misogyny, tough things that have to be talked about and done, because that directly impacts the decisions that are made. Raychelle: The reason why we have technological advances is because we have put our heart, our soul, and our dollars into innovation and change. Have we done that, really, with these other issues: the patriarchy, misogyny, white supremacy, anti-Blackness?

Annalee: Raychelle hopes that in the future we’ll tackle these issues rationally and systematically, the same way we improve our science. Because racial bias shows up in our technology, too. And it’s everywhere. Many of us will never deal with a Marquis Reagent test, but how often do you use automated soap dispensers in public restrooms? Even those have racial bias built in.

Raychelle: My dad couldn't use a soap dispenser because his skin was dark, and it didn't quite register at first. He had to do this weird—where you try it a couple of times to get it to work. Will that change?

Annalee: Obviously it’s a problem when Black men can’t use automated soap dispensers. But it becomes a life-threatening problem when our crime tech is also designed to favor people with light skin. Raychelle: Any great, elegant, beautiful tool that we think is going to be just awesome to help all this stuff, anything that we can use to elevate, can be used very easily to oppress and to violate people.

Annalee: To solve today’s problems we need to go beyond the lab and into the corridors of Congress and the courts. What we learn about ourselves now can help us design more humane ways to prevent crime in the future. If we could tackle the science problems—and the social problems with bias and power—what would crime solving look like? I asked Raychelle to get into our time machine and journey to the near future…

Annalee: We walk into a 22nd-century murder scene. Annalee: It is 150 years in the future and there's a woman, she’s dead in her living room. There’s signs of a struggle. There's furniture overturned, a couple of broken pieces of tchotchkes. There’s a half drunk cappuccino on the table. And she has a little bit of foam on her mouth, but there's no blood or other immediate clues to the cause of death. All right. You're our future forensics expert. What do you do? Raychelle: A couple of things you said really stand out to me. You've got the scene, it looks like a struggle. You've got this half drunk cappuccino, foam on the mouth. I'm thinking poison potentially. Now, is it self-inflicted, is it accidental? ... I'm going to want to collect this debris, obviously take all the photographs and document everything. But that cup and that cappuccino, it's all going to be tested.

Annalee: But instead of hauling it all to the lab and waiting weeks for results, Future Raychelle gets results fast. I guess you could say it’s taken about a century and a half for real life to catch up to TV. Raychelle: We’re just going to have everything smaller, cheaper, faster. If we’re 150 years in the future, I can test it right there. And the foam is interesting. That could be a lot of things … maybe some kind of alkaloid poisoning? And you might just pop out to your little mobile lab unit, do your sample prep, run it, you literally... Now you really are living in CSI land because it is that fast now. And you're like, “Ooh, boop, boop boop. Yes.”

Annalee: So she’s got an entire lab on a little cart that she just rolls into the crime scene, and she’s trying to figure out what’s in that cappuccino. But was this poisoning an accident, or was it foul play?

Raychelle: Or is it bad milk? Somebody could have poisoned that. The milk of the future, maybe it's completely engineered. How’s that lab run? You realize that whoever made this pseudo-milk has been violating all their safety protocols and it's like some kind of corporate malfeasance, right? I mean, there's many, many things it could be. Yes, it could absolutely be an accident. It could be murder. It could also be milk of the future, totally fabricated milk-like product, but they ran their lab real sketchy-like.

Annalee: Raychelle’s mobile chem lab of the future lets her quickly rule out bad milk and a deadly food allergy. Somebody has definitely added a nasty chemical to that cappuccino, and she immediately starts doing tests to figure out what it might be. Meanwhile, she asks her IT experts to download the house. Yep, you heard me right. The house itself is a smart device—we’re talking security systems, automated appliances, maybe even a robotic assistant—and Raychelle wants everything it has recorded. Raychelle: I want to know who's got passwords to what, what's the encryption, like, get that house electronically secured and download all that data. Like right now we have smart fridges, right? That actually have little cameras in your fridge. I'm going to want everything. … if you're missing or you're murdered, I'm downloading your Fitbit [Laughs].

Annalee: With super-fast chemical analysis and data from the smart home, Future Raychelle might actually be able to solve a crime in 48 hours, the way they do on TV. But even in this high-tech world, Raychelle thinks we might be surprised how much crime stays old-school.

Raychelle: Watch it be 150 years in the future where you could really come up with some dope ass futuristic ways to kill someone, and someone's like, "No, no friends. Let's just make it cyanide. Let's go retro." [Laughs] Annalee: As we solved this nefarious cappuccino murder, I couldn’t help but wonder what my favorite detective Veronica Mars would think. Sure, she’d love the tech. But she’d also be wondering about justice—would all this high tech crime-solving only be for privileged elites with fancy houses? I wondered if we could re-engineer our social biases the way Raychelle re-engineered those color tests. I asked Raychelle if she thinks there could be less bias in the future we imagined. Raychelle: You're asking me, do I think it'll happen? [Sigh] I hope it does. That's the best I can say. I can say that the fact that we're having serious conversations about reallocating the militarized police funds and social services and people are cracking jokes about, “Well, what do you want to do, send in a sociologist?” “Yes, actually. Yes, I do.” [Laughs] But actually having those conversations in the right stages, it gives me a little ... Dare I say, a little soupçon of hope.

Annalee: After looking into the future with Raychelle, I have some hope too.

Raychelle: Technology, as amazing as it is, is not going to save us. We are going to save ourselves. We make technology. We decide where the money goes. So we have to ask ourselves, are we willing to do some of this hard work on ourselves and our systems? Not only is it not just about solving crimes, but shouldn't we be trying to prevent some of this shit? [Laughs] It’s all gotta be on the table. If we're thinking that we can pawn it off on, “Oh, we just need the right gadget or the right algorithm or the whatever.” We build those. We write those. So if you're expecting them to magically not be trash, you need to stop, and we need to work on our own human will.

Annalee: There’s never going to be a future without crime, but one day we might see more justice.

Annalee: That was Dr. Raychelle Burks, Associate Professor of Analytical Chemistry at American University. Check out her column in Chemistry World magazine—it’s all about murder. And follow her on twitter @DrRubidium.

Annalee: Next time on Deep Futures, we’re talking about farming. Specifically the people who grow our food, and what the food system of the future may mean for them.

Armando Elenes: Just naming them essential for them was a big deal. But then they also started kind of being a little bit incredulous, like saying, “What do you mean, we’re essential? We're getting treated like dirt. We're having to expose ourselves to harvest America's food supply. But we're not given the essential benefits, we’re not being paid a living wage.” That really struck a chord with them.

Annalee: You won't wanna miss it. Subscribe to the podcast, and if you liked this episode, leave us a rating or a review. It helps other listeners find the show.

Annalee: Deep Futures is an original podcast made in partnership by Campside Media and Mailchimp. The show is hosted by me, Annalee Newitz. Our associate producer is Natalia Winkelman. Research help from Callie Hitchcock. Fact-checking by Aleah Papes. Sound design and mixing by Mark McAdam. And our Executive Producers are Maya Kroth and Matt Shaer. Beep-boop-boop-boop!