Is the "CSI Effect" Something We Should Worry About?

A recent article in a Canadian newspaper suggests that the CSI franchise may be detrimental to real-world crime fighting and court cases. The theory is that people watch the series and think that the real-world should be just easy and clean with everything getting solved in the period portrayed in a single episode.

A survey of 320 “jury-eligible” adults, for instance, indicated that the Canadian public has a strong preference for scientific evidence over more traditional evidence. A separate study of 190 CSI viewers showed that the more they watched, the more they believed in the reliability of forensic evidence. A recurring theme in crime dramas is that science is the only truth and that evidence such as DNA and fingerprints is superior to non-scientific evidence, including eyewitness accounts and confessions.

What do you think? Should this be concerning us? Do we need to worry about it? Let us know in our current poll.