Do and Don’ts When Choosing Crime Scene Cleanup Companies?

You don’t want to think that it would happen to you, but you could be the victim of a crime. If the crime is serious enough, you will need to hire a crime scene cleanup company. The crime could be simply that someone threw a brick through your window and left glass in your rugs, on your floors and in your furniture. This is a crime scene that needs cleaning up, but it doesn’t require much. A carpet cleaning company can do the work. However, crime scene cleanup can be as complicated as someone shot or beaten in your home or office. This type of crime scene cleanup deals with bodily fluids and hazardous waste. You need a special company to answer this call.

Because this is not something you normally require, you need to have advice on how to choose the right company. Here are some dos and don’ts regarding crime scene cleanup companies.

Dos:

• Look at the crime location. You will be able to determine whether you need to hire a cleanup crew. Without the hazardous materials, you probably can avoid the additional expense.
• Ask the police. The officers probably work with a couple of companies and can give you the names of companies they recommend. The companies regularly get hired for this type of work by the police officers. And, the industry has a limited number of competitors.
• Request certification. To be a crime scene cleanup company, the firm has to do certain things to be licensed and certified. If you see the certification, you know you are getting a company that works efficiently and well. You also know they will follow regulations and bring the right materials for the job.
• Get the certified crew. When you have a situation that involves, human or animal waste, blood, body fluids, chemicals, and acids, you have to have a trained crew doing the work. Otherwise, you will not get the place safe to inhabit. Also, the crew will be trained in dealing with those type of wastes. Certified crew know all the regulations, including federal regulations dealing with hazardous waste.
• Research. Don’t pick the first one. Read about the company in question. Find out what others, such as public personnel, have to say about the company. Learn their methods before they come to your door.
• Stay somewhere else. If the cleanup needs to be done at your home, you probably shouldn’t stay in the house until the cleanup crew gets it habitable again. If the crime happened at your office, you might want to work from home or somewhere else for a few days.

Don’ts:

• Treat your crew like a maid. Crime scene cleanup companies are there to take care of the hazardous materials, not clean your bathrooms unless the crime happened there. Cleanup crews will be efficient when dealing with the location of the crime, but they aren’t meant to venture into other parts of the home or office.
• Hire Molly Maids. Regular cleaning companies do not know how to handle hazardous wastes. They don’t know the federal and state regulations regarding cleanup and disposal of wastes. They also are not certified to clean these wastes. However, you can call a regular cleaning service is the situation does not involve hazardous wastes.
• Pick a company that does cleaning on the side. For the reasons stated earlier, this is not a good way to go when finding cleanup companies. They must be certified. A certified hazardous materials crime scene crew will get out all of the material without leaving any of the material behind. Some crime scene clean up crews do not take care when cleaning your space. They might use only bleach, which would not follow regulations.
• Do it yourself. Besides the pathogens involved in body fluids and blood, you would not know the regulations. You would be too traumatized. And, you would not have the specialized equipment. Again, you would not know how to handle hazardous wastes and be certified to deal with such materials. You may miss many spots you don’t see and aren’t trained to look. You may also end up throwing out materials that won’t need to be thrown out if properly cleaned.

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