The Crime Scene Investigations Unit is comprised of fifteen full time, certified police officers. The unit is a sub-division of the Criminal Investigation Division of the police department and consists of two Lieutenants, two Sergeants and eleven Investigators and provides services for the county as well as the cities of Riverdale, Forest Park and Jonesboro.

The Investigators are responsible for detecting, documenting, collecting, processing and preserving evidence from crime scenes. Each Investigator is trained in multiple disciplines including fingerprint comparison, crime scene processing, blood stain analysis, footwear comparison, death investigation, DNA collection, profiling sexual predators, and a vast amount of other training utilizing state of the art equipment.

Each investigator is required to compare the fingerprints obtained on the crime scenes they investigate and give expert testimony in court concerning positive identifications of fingerprints from those crime scenes. Fingerprint identifications play a major role in criminal apprehensions and convictions.

The Clayton County Police Department Crime Scene Investigations Unit is one of many police agencies in the metro Atlanta area to possess an A.F.I.S. (Automated Fingerprint Identification System) terminal. Once fingerprints are collected from a crime scene and a comparison is made to the victim for elimination purposes, the fingerprints are searched against the criminal database of fingerprints in the state of Georgia. The database contains the known fingerprints of approximately 3,000,000 criminal offenders and a search of the unknown fingerprints collected at a crime scene to the fingerprints in the database can usually yield a match within 15 minutes if the offender's fingerprints are on file. The system is also searched to help identify unidentified dead persons.