"I never aspired to become a criminologist; it's just where my skill set has taken me," says the Associate Professor in Criminology and former forensic photographer with the Australian Federal Police. "Police investigators have a range of forensic images at their disposal these days - CCTV footage, crime-scene photographs, dash cams, even self-incriminating images - and I try to develop robust methods so that these images can be tested and stand up to scrutiny in court."
A raft of popular television shows has lifted the lid on many crime investigation methods, but Glenn says the "CSI Effect" (after the program of the same name) is misleading."The media has invented a lot of notions about what evidence is and how it should be presented in court," he says.
As an experienced expert witness, Glenn has presented evidence in numerous high-profile Australian cases and international crimes against humanity for the United Nations.
"For me, it's not about catching criminals and getting convictions, but ensuring that law enforcement agencies are well equipped to interpret visual evidence like images," he says.
"Forensic evidence is also valuable when establishing intelligence and leads for investigators, and enables them to eliminate suspects quickly so that it doesn't waste valuable resources and cause undue harm to innocent people. That's the part that often gets missed in the television shows. Forensics plays as big a role in excluding suspects as it does in identifying perpetrators."
In a world dominated by visual media, where crimes are now routinely captured on smart phones or closed circuit TV (CCTV) cameras, images can prove vital to police investigations. However, Glenn says facts and not a "media narrative of truth" need to be extracted from the images for them to be reliable as evidence.
"My expert testimony is commonly around being able to understand how images are interpreted or analysed by forensic experts, which can be influenced by technical aspects such as resolution, contrast and distortion," he says.
"Giving evidence can be stressful, because our courts are founded on an adversarial system. Barristers can be very tricky and lead you down a certain path and then they've 'gotcha'. Often you are not asked the right questions and sometimes that's a problem, but I've always found truth to be the best approach."
As a specialist in the use of images as forensic evidence, Glenn has been closely following the evolution of facial identification. Most recently he's been conducting workshops for Australian Federal Police imaging teams to help them understand the imaging quality concepts that influence facial identification.
"Faces don't remain the same - they age over time - and physically change," Glenn says. "They can also appear different, depending on the lighting and how the person has been photographed."
Image: "Purple Flowers" by Glenn Porter - an image created from Glenn's experimentation with double refraction techniques in photography.
A self-confessed "photography nut", Glenn leaves crime out of his own darkroom. When he's not teaching about the Australian criminal justice system and forensic science, he's interested in "telling stories through art photography". At the moment he's experimenting with complex double refraction techniques to create images on plastic, but is also keen to embark on a project to document the diversity of Armidale's people through a series of portraits.
"Forensic imagery is all about drawing information or evidence from an image, whereas my art work focuses on the aesthetics of photography - the composition and lighting," Glenn says. "Being creative is part of my profile."
Find out more about UNE's new Centre for Rural Criminology.
