FINGERPRINTING
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How can you match a fingerprint to a person?
You’ve heard that police use fingerprints to solve crimes. Here’s why: fingerprints are one of the best and easiest ways to identify a person. Fingers have slightly raised lines that form patterns, and every finger has its own unique pattern. Natural oils from the skin are left behind when a person touches something, leaving a fingerprint pattern. Forensic (detective) scientists study fingerprint patterns to match them to a particular person. No two people have the same fingerprints, so it is a very useful way of placing someone at the scene of a crime if you can find evidence of their fingerprints there. Often, scientists have only part of a fingerprint to study. Look at the print shown on the right. That’s a "latent" or unknown print that detectives found.If you were a forensic scientist working in a lab, you would use a latent print to try to find a match among thousands of "known" prints in the police’s computer files. How do scientists – with the help of computers -- search for matches? They look for basic types of patterns in the fingerprint lines. Three of the basic patterns are shown on page 2. They are called, in order, Plain Arch, Ulnar Loop, and Plain Whorl. The Fingerprint branch at New Scotland Yard (Metropolitan Police, London) was set up in July 1901 and the first criminal conviction using fingerprints as evidence was in 1902 (in a burglary case) |
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