Summary Writing Task Finger Printing

question_id: 5442

Finger Printing

The oldest forensic crime-solving method in history is still the most commonly used to identify persons of interest in police investigations, accounting for almost 11,000 fingerprint identifications in Victoria during the last financial year.

Not only are fingerprints the leading source of forensic identifications, but they are also the fastest.

Ongoing improvements to fingerprint examination and processes at Victoria Police’s Forensic Services Department means turnaround times for results are continuously improving.

“Fingerprints are one of the quickest and most reliable sources of forensic evidence used in criminal and coronial investigations,” fingerprint expert Danielle Lynch said.

And it is faster turnaround times for fingerprint results that give Victoria Police a head start on identifying and arresting possible offenders of high volume and major crimes – the quicker investigators receive the information, the sooner they can make arrests and interrupt recidivist offending.

Earlier this year, police in Geelong were investigating a series of home burglaries and vehicle thefts across multiple suburbs in the area. The local Fingerprint Sciences Group (FSG) was tasked with analysing the fingerprints left behind at the crime scenes and quickly linked them all to one offender.

With collaboration between the Crime Scene Services Unit, an analyst and the Crime Investigation Unit, the owner of the prints was identified as a previously unknown offender. The man’s prints were linked to more than 20 crime scenes, giving police enough evidence to lay charges and stop further crimes from taking place.

Victoria Police took more than 70,000 sets of fingerprints in the 2017-18 financial year that were added to the national fingerprint database, where the prints of more than five million individuals are stored. New prints can be from a variety of sources, including those taken from people in police custody and for civil purposes such as visa applications.

“The national fingerprint database has the capability to continuously compare unsolved crime scene fingerprints on record with new known reference samples added to the collection,” Ms Lynch said. This sometimes provides welcome results on unsolved and cold case investigations, and the identification of serial rapist and murderer Raymond Edmunds is a Victorian success. His fingerprints were taken in NSW in 1985 and linked him to a number of serious and violent Victorian crimes committed from the 1960s to the 1980s.

But it is not an easy process to recover, analyse and match fingerprints. Becoming an expert in the field takes four to five years of on-the-job training and theory, learning photography, chemical development techniques, the biology of skin and foetal development and giving opinion evidence in court.

Fingerprint expert Craig Hamilton has 21 years of experience behind him. He is the team leader of the Operations Unit, responsible for examining major crime scenes and evidence recovery. “It takes a long time to develop the knowledge required to examine items for latent prints,” he said. “Our job is to get what’s not visible, examine it and make it visible.”

This is done using a variety of light sources, imaging devices and chemical development techniques to examine different items. Today, Mr Hamilton is using a forensic light source to visualise a print on a can.

“Some of the most common items we examine are bottles and weapons,” he said. “We use different techniques to identify prints and take swabs for DNA. It used to take a couple of weeks to get a fingerprint result, but now we can provide a result to the investigating police in one day.”

Mr Hamilton described an incident where the FSG was provided with a newspaper left at the scene of a rape. “We got fingerprints off the newspaper and gave the offender’s name to the police informants before the man had even arrived home,” he said.

The Operations Unit is six months into a pilot program aiming to improve efficiencies in examining firearms police have seized. Firearms are swabbed for DNA before being checked for fingerprints by the fingerprint team and then analysed by a ballistics expert, all in one day.

While bottles, cans, paper and weapons are the most common items submitted for examination, there are some strange ones too. The team has fingerprinted skin left behind at a crime scene and recently analysed prints taken from a mandarin.

One of their more difficult roles is recovering fingerprints from unidentified deceased and accident victims, which is crucial in providing intelligence and notifying families of a loss. Their expertise in this area has led to fingerprint experts being deployed overseas to assist with Disaster Victim Identification, most recently in the 2014 Malaysia Flight 17 crash.