CLPEX Chat Board

Latent Prints: A Perspective on the State of the Science

I do not know why I did not catch this sooner but the following is a link to the article “Latent Prints: A Perspective on the State of the Science” as published in the Forensic Science Communications (Oct. 2009, Vol. 11, Number 4).

http://www.fbi.gov/hq/lab/fsc/current/r ... view01.htm

I think it is a very nice article. I do not agree with every word that is printed on it but since this is an article published by the FBI you might want to pay a little attention to it as I could envision that it would become as meaningful as the OIG report on Mayfield.

For those of you from PD and SO, you might want to look at appendix ‘B’ and capture a small picture of the future (possible future). Make sure you take your blood pressure medicine.

There are several topics that have been covered in several threads recently such as probability and error rate.

Overall this is a good document. I am however not hanging my hat on every word of it. After all the Feds and the State Labs live in a different world than I do.

The national school system has merit. It provides a known training standard that states could hang their hats on. Of course, that's the rub. The states control the issue, as they do in all other areas of expertise. For instance, it's not a training issue, but, effectively, if you want to testify as a physician in any matter that requires you to diagnose, you must have a Texas medical license. The more practical solution is probably a mix of all three concepts, operated under a national training accreditation program that imposes the same training standards on every venue but allows more local and regional training.

I see one of the most valuable things that could come from that being the simultaneous distribution of the most current information everywhere. I would favor a certification that grew out of completion of the accredited training and mentorship over the CLPE program in which, in my opinion, the nature of the testing actually models poor practice that in no way reflects actual work practice.

I've been through something like what I expect the evolution will be. Paramedic training was originally something that was strictly local training and authority of the local system's physician medical director. Individual states began developing training standards and requiring state certification. The USDOT (their angle was that trauma care was tied to highway transportation) developed a national training standard, and a National Registry testing program began. Paramedics could practice in most states under a state certification. Some states deferred to the National Registry program, rather than maintain their own certification program. Over time, the individual state programs came fully into line with the national training standard. In many states, National Registry became then less of an issue and was less seen as a superior certification. It's a classic model of federal standards model development that accomplishes the end by putting a lot of federal resources into development and research and modeling a high standard. This sort of thing usually uses a stick and carrot approach in which federal funding of related projects is tied to a state working toward conforming. We may eventually see that if a strong federal desire develops.

Gerald if anyone could sell me on a National Training System it would be you since I have a pretty good idea where you heart is.

So you sold me-----a National system it is for me from now on. However I feel some of the government problems that are generally inherent in such a system will raise their head.

Until that time when they do I will bite my tongue. So how do we scrap the TPA Training here in Texas and other states that only train 40-80-120 hours at a time. Time to move away from them and create a Texas College of Latent Print Analysis?

The other problem is that some smaller agencies are not going to be able to let someone go for that length of training?

I guess for every cure there is a modicum of pain.

Fare thee well to the small craft (agency) examiner. Hasta La Vista Baby.

You might be right. I don't know that it's entirely a bad thing. And, as you know, that's from someone who was always a small agency guy. But I don't know that it's strictly the end of small agency fingerprint expertise. I've always had a concern about some small agency fingerprint work. It's not just the initial training that's hard on small agencies. Good continuing training is hard. It's where we find a lot of the long-time practitioners with no training beyond the initial TPA series and no real further connection to the print community. I worry about those, because the quality of attorney knowledge in those areas is even less than the generally poor understanding of print issues in larger jurisdictions. A complete lack of comparison training would indeed work a hardship on DPS. I wonder if there's not a place for a serious effort to train small agency folks in the essentials of examination, with the understanding that you wouldn't like to have them doing official conclusions. But they would be able to effectively screen out valueless latents and keep the DPS submissions down to the better prospects. That's just an investigative skill, the ability to determine when analysis is appropriate. That's really about all you can expect from someone who just completed the basic courses and have no on-site mentor and no great volume of work.

I think there's a very large expertise gap between the less sophisticated and the most sophisticated examiners. As more and more attention is paid to legal and research issues, that gap seems to be steadily growing. There was a time when there was talk of the state requiring a degree for paramedics and a lot of grumbling. But at the same time, there was grumbling about low pay and status within the medical practitioners. I tried to make the point that, if you want to be considered a professional, you're facing the reality that, in general, those with professional status were degreed. The state faced the same sort of problem we're talking about. If they required the degree, they made it difficult or impossible for huge areas of the state to provide EMS advanced life support, because the medics were often volunteers with other full-time jobs, and there was no money to send people off for degrees. It's a little different situation, since lack of that kind of care was not an option. You can't do it remotely.

I guess we need to remember that latent print examination wasn't left out of the accredited lab requirement in Texas, not because it wasn't as important as other analysis, but because the resources weren't there to take it away from small agencies. It all comes back to money. Whether you subsidize small agency training and staffing or whether you want to establish area latent print units, someone is going to be paying significantly more than they are now. One favorite way for the state to fund projects is to tack another item onto criminal court costs. Those things generate a surprising amount of money. The good news is that in a lot of our 254 counties, one full-time examiner could handle the whole load for the county and, in a good number of them, one examiner could handle all the work for multiple counties. The fact that a number of D.A.'s handle multiple counties, suggests that the number of cases is low enough to do that. The capabilities of most counties would be significantly enhanced if they had a decent processing lab and examiner and ready access to AFIS, and they would likely have an examiner where there's now none and the examiner they had would be better than most have now.

The Texas College of Latent Print Analysis would be interesting. It might be appropriate to scale it to an associate degree. It might be a good prospect for the TSTC system. It's a little tricky. Kind of like what the heck are all those graduates from the explosion of CSI degree programs going to do for jobs. If each of them even graduated a few latent print examiners each year, it would be an outstanding way to be unemployable. But I think the logistical problems are more in the conundrum of whether you do a long training with supervised work built in or figure out how to do the mentorships back home. It's something that doesn't readily occur to folks like the FBI authors, since they don't worry about how to provide latent print work in each field office and they just don't internally generate print cases the way local agencies do.

Charles,

overall very intresting but looking closely at fig 2 the series of illustrations demonstrating the information that latent print examiners consider when evaluating sufficiency;

In the present climate of scrutiny, justification etc etc is this the level of detail that is now required in your 'comparison notes' that you would attend court with? OR do you have a proforma type comparison notes check sheet? Or something else?

Tks Mike.

Mike, I think FIG . 2 is just an illustration showing a possible 6 areas that a LPE might look at in determining sufficiency. It is not a level of documentation, although I have seen some recent documentation that kind of look like it.

In reading it they took a fair stab at sufficiency (how much is enough?)---probably better than anyone else has in book form or article that I have seen (someone correct me please).

Now back to documentation, if you go to the SWGFAST site and looking at some of their new stuff you will see a level of documentation that is well-----you must judge on your own. I think the gray area on documentation in this country is very varied. The lower the food chain the less impact and function it has. The higher the food chain the more it has to do with ‘What Is’ and is consuming Redwood Trees at an alarming rate (a stab at humor).

The last time I tried to get a posting going on sufficiency (I was gearing it towards determining sufficiency during the 2 phase comparison), and I don’t think some got my point very well.

I love to read, discuss and talk about Distortion, Documentation, and I am now into Sufficiency. I will need to read more on the FBI’s Fig 2 display and see what concepts I can fold into my Technical Manual.

Want to talk about Documentation and Sufficiency, shoot start a new thread. I will jump in when I am able.

Gerald ---- Don't go away----I will be back.