Fingerprint Identification

Skilled fingerprint examiners agree that comparing unknown fingerprints with those ink impressions of known origins is more or less an ‘art’ instead of a ‘science’. Fingerprints that have been collected from the evidence brought back from a crime scene or directly from the scene can be used by forensic scientists to identify possible suspects, victims and other persons who may have been involved.

Yes, fingerprint identification has indeed emerged as a very important scientific technique within many of the police agencies today. Since its development, this technique has replaced many of the former systems like anthropometrics measurements, and has emerged as the more reliable method for identifying possible suspects with previous crime records. Fingerprint identification is a science that stands out amongst most of the other forensic sciences today, and for many good reasons – because of its reliability and superiority.

Fingerprint Identification and its Origins
All over the world, fingerprint identification has served police forces and governments alike for over a hundred years now in order to provide them with accurate and reliable information of suspects and criminals. It is common knowledge that no two fingerprints will ever be the same, and this information has been surmised from the hundreds of millions of human as well as automated computer comparisons made.

Yes, fingerprints are now considered to be the very foundation of our criminal history, and have become a very important part to every police and forensics agency today.

The first professional forensics organization – the IAI or the International Association for Identification – was founded in the year 1915. It established the world’s first certification program for forensic scientists all over the world. The Certified Latent Print Examiner Program was started in the year 1977 and issues certification to all those candidates who meet the stringent criteria, and has also revoked certification from those candidates who have committed serious errors like erroneous identifications.

Yes, fingerprints still remain the most popular method used for forensic evidence all over the globe. In almost every jurisdiction, fingerprint evidence outnumbers almost any other forensic evidence or examination work combined! It continues to evolve and expand as the ideal method for identifying suspects, with hundreds of thousands of persons being added to fingerprint repositories in the US alone – far outweighing any other similar database in terms of growth. Fingerprint ID has even managed to outperform DNA testing and any of the other human identification techniques that are used to identify suspicious persons like rapists, murderers and any criminal offender.

It is said the fingerprints have solved ten times more crime cases that DNA in practically every jurisdiction.

How Fingerprint ID works?
Fingerprint identification requires a fingerprint examiner to first assess what parts of a partial, incomplete or blurred latent fingerprints show some amount of visible friction ridge that could be used for identification.

Fingerprint identification works on three basic premises, which are:

• The friction ridge part of the epidermis on the persons palm side will always remain the same during a persons lifetime unless if damaged due to an accident or intentionally altered or scarified.
• The friction ridge areas exhibit patterns that are so full of detail that there are simply no two patterns that can be found the same on the palms and on the soles of the feet.
• While these ridge patterns do exhibit a diverse variety of detail, nevertheless, they also fall within certain categories that permit forensic scientists and police to store and then retrieve millions of other prints according to the classification formulae.

Although most authors and reporters claim that fingerprint identification has long enjoyed an aura of infallibility – this is false. Fingerprint ID is the first forensic method to formally establish a certification program for professionals.

Fingerprints ID’s has lead to more positive identifications of people all over the world than any other known human identification method.