I’m going to let you in on a secret.  Each year, the National Institute of Justice holds a summer conference in Arlington, Virginia.  NIJ is the research, development and evaluation agency of the United States Department of Justice.  This year’s conference (link above) is scheduled for June 18-20.  Registration is free.  Let me repeat: registration is free.

Sessions at NIJ conferences cover all kinds of criminal justice issues.  This year, they include topics like:

• Applying an Action Research Framework to the Problem of Untested Sexual Assault Evidence
• The Role of Science in Policing 
• Protecting Officers by Taking NIJ Body Armor Research to the Field 
• Molecular Autopsies:  It’s all in the Genes 
• W.E.B. Du Bois Fellows and the American Immigrant: Crime Victimization Experiences of Immigrant Populations
• Whodunnit? Latent Fingerprints: Making a Powerful Crime Fighting Tool Even Better
• Sexual Assault Forensic Practices
• Crowd Sourcing Crime Fighting 
• Automation as a Cost Efficient Addition to the Forensic DNA Laboratory

And that’s just a small sampling of what is offered.

I’ve attended a couple of these conferences in the past, and I hope to attend at least some of the sessions this year.  If you are a thriller writer, this is a fantastic and free (FREE!) way to keep abreast of the lastest criminal justice research and technological developments.  It will make you writing seem more authentic; it will give you ideas for plots.