Audio Transcript

Mollie Halpern: The FBI’s Evidence Response Teams, or ERTs, are deployed to complex crime scenes and catastrophic world events to recover evidence.

Thomas Lintner: Orlando, Dallas, San Bernardino, Boston Marathon—those are four examples of very high-profile cases that have occurred recently that the ERT teams have supported.

Halpern: That was Section Chief Thomas Lintner of the Forensic Response Section, who says protecting the integrity of evidence is painstaking and detailed work.

Lintner: Collecting evidence in a defensible manner so that it can be admitted into court is a very sophisticated process, and it requires training and discipline when you’re on the scene. And if it isn’t done properly, we lose the evidence, which, in turn, may cause us to lose a case in court.

Halpern: USERT [Underwater Search and Evidence Response Team] members are certified and forensically trained divers armed with state-of-the-art equipment.

The estimated 1,400 members of these teams support FBI investigations but also are available to assist law enforcement partners with their cases.

With FBI, This Week, I’m Mollie Halpern of the Bureau.