I agree. However, the critics of our profession see this stuff as good scientific research and will point to this garbage and use it as a reason to say "research in fingerprint identification serves to possibly threaten the current status quo of fingerprint identification."
Steve (no clever screen name) Skowron
Fingerprint Dogma
-
sharon cook
Simon Cole
I went to the site noted in Steve Skowron's posting and had a good, hearty laugh. Two fingerprints with 16 points that matched! Even the most casual glance showed that they were not even close. They WERE both whorls, though. I guess that counts for something...maybe...?
-
Shaheen
Dear foren6
I would like to address the following:
"embryology studies... does not give scientific validity to LATENT PRINT IDENTIFICATION"
When referencing embryological studies, I was answering the original question posted by "guest" about some of the reasons why we are able to say that fingerprints are unique. This is an important step in making an identification, because if fingerprints did not have the property of uniqueness we wouldn't bother.
On the surface, the problem you would like addressed appears to be with the science of the actual comparison. There are already limits as imposed by the ACE-V method. That an examiner can only conclude that they have reached a positive identification when they are able to reliably predict the correlation of one print feature with another in sequence. And they have to be able to demonstrate how they arrived at that conclusion so that others are able to reach the same conclusion given the same information. When done correctly it is a scientific process.
With regards to "points", the reason it was abolished was because perfectly good identifications made on 3rd level detail would be missed. I believe that this is evidence of the progression of our science.
Perhaps your issue is really with the integrity of some examiners? In this case, you can have all the definitions and scales in the world to measure the quality and clarity of a fingerprint, but you will still have examiners pushing the boundaries. It's the same way that we have driving speed limits on the roads. A minority of people are still going to break them, so making more speed limits probably wont help. And that is also why we have verification steps and challenges in court to police those identifications. Maybe this process is what needs to be addressed?
And yes, the comment about the way we make babies was tongue in cheek, but the issue is still relevant - why can we not reference research from 30 years ago when there have not been any advance in the technology that can be used to test it?
I would like to address the following:
"embryology studies... does not give scientific validity to LATENT PRINT IDENTIFICATION"
When referencing embryological studies, I was answering the original question posted by "guest" about some of the reasons why we are able to say that fingerprints are unique. This is an important step in making an identification, because if fingerprints did not have the property of uniqueness we wouldn't bother.
On the surface, the problem you would like addressed appears to be with the science of the actual comparison. There are already limits as imposed by the ACE-V method. That an examiner can only conclude that they have reached a positive identification when they are able to reliably predict the correlation of one print feature with another in sequence. And they have to be able to demonstrate how they arrived at that conclusion so that others are able to reach the same conclusion given the same information. When done correctly it is a scientific process.
With regards to "points", the reason it was abolished was because perfectly good identifications made on 3rd level detail would be missed. I believe that this is evidence of the progression of our science.
Perhaps your issue is really with the integrity of some examiners? In this case, you can have all the definitions and scales in the world to measure the quality and clarity of a fingerprint, but you will still have examiners pushing the boundaries. It's the same way that we have driving speed limits on the roads. A minority of people are still going to break them, so making more speed limits probably wont help. And that is also why we have verification steps and challenges in court to police those identifications. Maybe this process is what needs to be addressed?
And yes, the comment about the way we make babies was tongue in cheek, but the issue is still relevant - why can we not reference research from 30 years ago when there have not been any advance in the technology that can be used to test it?