Amber B.'s TOO MANY EXCLAMATION POINTS

32, Crime Scene Investigator, North Carolina

The perspectives and stories shared in this conversation reflect only those of the speakers and in no way represent the viewpoints of their employers or connected organizations.

---

Amber is a 32-year-old crime scene investigator living in North Carolina. During this episode of TOO MANY EXCLAMATION POINTS, she shares about her career path in law enforcement, how she feels about her compensation, and the alternative living set-up she and her husband have.

Please note: Our conversation has been edited and condensed for this newsletter. Enjoy the full conversation with Amber on the TOO MANY EXCLAMATION POINTS podcast through Substack and on Spotify.

---

Who are you, what do you do for a living and what are you passionate about right now?

Hi, my name is Amber. What I do for a living is crime scene investigation. I am currently passionate about working on my converted school bus, which we call a skoolie.

I love that! And Amber, can you share your 3-to-5-minute career journey from being in high school knowing what you wanted to go to college for and pursuing what that may look like, all the way through to where you are in your current position.

Yeah, (chuckles), When I was in high school, I had originally wanted to go to art school. I had applied to art schools and gotten accepted. Then my senior year, they offered a college level forensics course which I thought was interesting and signed up for that. I was instantly hooked. From that point I decided I wanted to pursue that and that’s what I went to college for. I got a degree in Forensic Science and Crime Scene Investigation with a minor in Psychology, and that was a Bachelor of Science degree.

Once I graduated college, I started applying for jobs. It’s a very, very difficult field to get into. Because of all the CSI shows on tv, a lot of people are interested in that career. So, I applied for four years for crime scene investigation jobs. In that time period, I first worked a little security gig right out of college, got into corrections and did that for about four months. Then, I got a job as a police officer with a local city police department. I worked there for four years while I continued to apply for jobs, which was a career I enjoyed, but not my ultimate goal. Finally, I got offered a position in North Carolina working as a crime scene investigator, it was between there and Florida. I had interviews for years and years, was flying all over the country, spending a ton of money, and then finally got job offers all at the same time.

We love that though, that’s great!

So, I moved to North Carolina in January 2019, and I’ve been a crime scene investigator that whole time. I did spend about ten months at a second agency where we started up a brand-new crime scene unit, and I just missed where I was before, so we moved back. But yeah, that’s the long and short of it.

That’s great. So, what is it about your work and industry that you feel others have misconceptions about? You mentioned the television shows and media and all that that plays into it. What do you wish people knew about the true work of a crime scene investigator?

It’s not like tv. I mean, there’s the basic similarities, but we’re not coming into crime scenes and spending five minutes there and leaving. I can be on a scene for an entire 12-hour shift sometimes. It’s extremely time-consuming. The thing people don’t realize: for however long you spend on scene, you’re spending potentially five times as long in the lab working on evidence and typing reports. Our reports are very, very detailed, very scientific. So, it’s extremely time-consuming to do the whole back-end of things as well.

Other than your obvious training in college, is there a specific skillset that you feel like you connect to every single day to do your work?

Yes, first you need to figure out how to multitask. You often have a lot of things thrown at you at once. We have a basic set of things we do at a crime scene, but due to weather conditions and loss of fleeting evidence, you might have to change on the fly what you’re doing and the order you’re doing things. So, you need to learn how to navigate that and be thinking about 100 different things at the same time. On every single scene, everything from break-ins to homicides, every scene you’re doing notes and photographs at the bare minimum. So, photography is a big skill and note-taking, as well.

So, there’s your art school essence right there with the photography!

Yes, and we also do sketches on scene as a form of notes. You don’t have to do one on every scene, but you can do a sketch in place of notes. So, sometimes I’ll do that instead of describing where every single object is in the room, you can draw it and then type your report based on that, instead of hand-written details, as long as your sketch is descriptive and makes sense to the lay-person.

Did you take a specific class on that type of sketching, or do you just truly go back to your natural art skills?

Yeah, the quality of your sketch goes with your basic art skills. But, the content of it, you’re trained in-house on how they want you to do sketches. It’s usually just a birds-eye view sketch of things, we can do elevation and vertical sketches, it’s just much less often that that needs to be done.

Oh that’s fascinating. The world of law enforcement is very male-dominated, that’s typically what we see. For you, are there thought patterns or actions that you’ve put into place across your last ten years of a career to help you navigated a male-dominated career and that experience?

You kind of just figure out how different it is working with men. Interestingly enough, forensics and crime scene investigation is a heavily female-dominated field. It’s different than the rest of law enforcement. When I was a cop, it was 90% male, same with corrections. We had trouble getting females in there at all. But crime scene specifically, everywhere that I know there is 90-95% female. Yeah, in our crime scene unit, we have 20-ish people, we only have two men, and one of those is brand-new who I’m training, but everyone else is female.

Oh wow, then that’s a misconception, just from being someone who’s clearly not educated enough about it, but that’s incredible. For you, how does that feel to be able to be around women everyday?

Oh that feels good. It’s different working with 90% women vs. 90% men, I’ve been in both places. How men and women operate is different, but with my field a lot of the women are pretty laidback as far as how we can get along with each other. A lot of Type A personalities too, just because of the type of job we have, so sometimes there are clashes with that. But, we still work closely with investigators and police. There’s a police officer on every single scene with us because my position is a civilian position in the state of North Carolina. In most states, crime scene positions are civilian, some of them are sworn, it just depends on the agency and the state. There has to be someone on every scene because we’re not armed. They respond first, and then they secure the scene to make sure it’s safe for us, and then we respond out and do what we do. Obviously, I’m not paying attention to all my surroundings when I’m taking photographs, I’m honed in on that thing. So, we need to have someone watching your back and making sure everything’s okay.

Understandable. This is a stressful job, right? For you, how do you try to separate what you see and experience in your day-to-day job from coming home, being with your husband … what does that look like for you, both the work-life balance and creating a separation?

You need to learn how to compartmentalize very well. We see a lot of very traumatic things, that a lot of people can’t handle. You need to be a certain personality type to be able to do this job. It can mess with people, for sure. Separating your emotions from the logical part of things, as far as a crime scene goes. And you try not to bring too much of it home, obviously if I’ve had a hard day and I need to talk, my husband is here and he’s happy to listen to it. He doesn’t love when I talk about gory things while we’re eating dinner. (chuckles) But, I work a schedule where, it’s called the Pitman rotation, so you end up with every other three-day weekend off, and its 11.5 hour shifts. Because of that, I have the same amount of days off every month as days that I work. So, you can maintain a pretty good work-life balance, as long as I’m not picking up a lot of overtime, which I tend to do. Like, I worked the last seven days in a row, but normally I only work 14-15 days a month on my normal schedule. It just depends on how much overtime I want to pick up. I enjoy my job, I like being there, but if I need time at home, I have the opportunity for that and with my schedule, I’m off for the next two weeks, and I only have to use seven days of PTO. If I take two days off on my short week, then I get the whole week off.

So, you mentioned overtime. Do you feel like with your work, with what you see, do you feel like you’re well-compensated in your role, and would love your perspective and your thoughts on your long-term future in the industry.

Well, as far as compensation, law enforcement is historically not well-compensated. It’s the same for forensics and sometimes investigation. For the past ten years, I have not been compensated very well. My husband works in IT and he makes, he’s been making more than double what I make for most of the time we’ve been together, and I do far more than him, and he says that. So, we’ve been kind of getting paid crap for the last however many years. They just did a massive pay study in the city where I work, and they realized how low paid we are compared to other agencies. In the field we’re not paid enough, but compared to other cities, we were way below the median of what other agencies are making. So, they did the pay study, a market increase, and that happened at the same time as merit increases. So, I got a market increase, then a merit increase, and I just got a promotion to Senior CSI, so now I’m making a good amount of money.

I think I’m making good money now, but it’s taken ten years and after ten years in law enforcement I should be making more than what I’m making. Most of these positions, it depends on the agency, I’ve seen some as low as $35,000, which I don’t know who can live on that, and you’re required to have a Bachelor’s degree now. You’re dealing with pretty traumatic stuff and doing chemical processing in the lab and evidence processing, you need to know a lot, so I just don’t think we’re compensated enough for what we do.

No, definitely not, and I appreciate your transparency with that, Amber. And just to touch back, do you think this is your long-term career? Is this what you want to do forever?

Yes. We’ve got some plans in the works for us, though. This is the only job I’ve ever wanted to do, besides something in the art realm, but I do that on my downtime. But this is the only career I’ve ever wanted, and I love it, so I think I’d like to continue doing that.

However, burnout is real, especially in this field. It would be really nice to take a couple years off and just not work or do something different, and then come back to it, which at this point I can do. It was really hard to get into the field at first, but now that I have almost ten years of experience in law enforcement, six years in crime scene, it’s a lot easier to get a job. I’ve got a certification through the International Association of Identification now, as a crime scene analyst, which is a big deal in our field. I think that’s going to help me a lot if I take some time off. We converted a school bus into a home, and we want to travel full-time in that school bus, for at least a year or two. Long-term, yes, I’d like to go back to crime scene, but at some point, I’m going to take some time off because you can’t do that remotely and I’d like to travel around with my husband.

Well, I love that. You mention the school bus that you renovated, and you live in full-time. Can you share about y’alls decision behind that pursuit, what you love most about it?

During COVID, my husband was home a lot, that is when he switched to full-time remote and he hasn’t gone back and he loves that. He was seeing a lot of videos online about people converting school buses and vans, like everyone sees van life, but skoolies, a skoolie is a school bus that’s been converted. Skoolies started to come up and he was like, “that could be a cool thing.” I was like, “Yeah, that sounds fun, let’s do it,” so we talked about maybe getting a bus. We had a house at the time, but during that timeframe, we had gotten married, I switched jobs and we sold our house all in the same two weeks, which was a lot. We moved out to the western side of the state and we were in an apartment, we did a six-month lease. About two months in, we were like, “rent is insane,” COVID changed everything, the market is wild, apartment prices are crazy, we’re not buying a house right now and I don’t want to pay $2,000 a month to live. So, I was like, “let’s do this school bus thing.”

So, we went on Facebook Marketplace, and we found a good deal. It already had a roof raise, so the roof’s been lifted some 20 inches, that’s a $10,000 job that my husband didn’t want to do, but he wanted one because he’s six feet tall. So, we drove out to Georgia, and it had already been gutted so it was a blank slate for us. We brought it home and we were not extending our lease, so we had four months to get it kind of livable. At the point where we moved in, we had a bed, an oven, a fridge, plumbing was ran but we didn’t have a sink, we didn’t have a shower, we barely had heat, but it was insulated. We moved into it December 1st after moving out of our apartment and moving into the bus/storage, and then flying to France for our postponed honeymoon. Upon flying back, we went straight to the bus and almost froze to death, (chuckles), but my thought was, “I’m not extending my lease, we’re just going to figure it out.” We continued to work on it while living in it. Now it’s been two years since we’ve been in the bus, we’re still working on it, but it was probably livable within a few months of being in it. It was like camping in it first. It’s been a fun process and we’ve enjoyed it a lot. It’s not easy, nothing is straight in a school bus, nothing is square and it moves. You have to build things that are really stable structurally. We had no experience at all, Youtube University all the way. Luckily, he has experience doing electrical wiring, but we had to learn plumbing, literally everything else.

Do you think this will be a long-term thing for you all? Obviously, you guys want to travel full-time. Do you think you’ll live “alternatively” for a while?

It is alternative living though, not everyone lives in a school bus. (chuckles) Long-term, it depends on what you consider long-term. Probably at least another three years, is my guess, things could change. It’s very affordable to live in a bus if you’re not moving it. We’ve been lucky to find good lot rent at places where we’ve stayed, because we’re stationary right now, and we just travel when we have time off work. So, we’re paying off all debt, quickly, so the goal is by sometime next year, hopefully all debt will be paid off completely, and we’ll be able to live off his salary, and I’ll probably do art on the side. There’s something called work-camping that you can do, where you work in place of staying places for free, so I might do that, but with that you have to stay somewhere at least three months, and I want to travel. Just trying to get set up for that. How long we stay in the bus just depends on life, I guess, when I want to get back into work, where I can get a job at. You can’t get a crime scene job everywhere, and detectives can do that work who are sworn. I haven’t been sworn now for six years, so I’d have to go through an entire new police academy if I went back into a sworn position, and there are cut-offs for sworn positions, 35 years-old is the cut-off for being in the academy.

RAPID FIRE

• What is a piece of advice you received that has impacted the way you look at building and maintaining your career?

  • “Just keep swimming,” is the first thing that comes to mind. You just gotta keep pushing forward. It took years to get this job, and I just had to keep going and fighting until I got there.

• Yes, persistence is good. What do you hope for yourself in 5 years?

  • That’s a hard question, you know, after COVID everything’s changed. Five years, I would have said I’d like to be running a crime scene unit, who knows, especially with the travel. I could change my mind and want to do something completely different, but I don’t see that at this point.

• What have you read or listened to recently that has stuck with you?

  • Have you ever seen Perks of Being a Wildflower? I love that movie. There’s a quote in there that says, “We accept the love we think we deserve,” and that’s just the first thing that comes to mind that has stuck with me.

• What is your favorite thing to get you excited, jazzed up, ready to go for a big day?

  • Blasting the music, dancing around the house. It gets me all excited and ready to go for the day.

• What is your preferred way to use vacation time or PTO?

  • Travelling. 100%. Either flying internationally or in the bus.

• Finally, what is your TOO MANY EXCLAMATION POINTS right now?

  • I have one for each. Excitement is getting this bus finished and seeing what bus life has in store for us, we’re getting toward the end of the build process, so that’s super exciting. And then, anxiety, I had a homicide the day before we left, so I have a ton of evidence that is waiting for me at work, and some of it needs to get to other units quickly, so someone else is having to process it chemically before it can go to the unit. So, I’m anxious about that because someone’s having to do part of my job, are they going to be mad at me? Stuff is waiting for me, and investigators are going to be down my neck, so that’s an anxiety especially right before you take time off work.

Thank you so much to Amber for joining us this week and her transparency and candor in our conversation. Our podcast together goes into even more detail, so I encourage you to take a listen.

Be sure to share in the comments something that Amber said that resonated with you or send this episode to a friend to encourage them on their journey.

As always, I’m grateful you’re here and wish you a week ahead with only the best exclamation points! — Skylar