Introduction
Try to think of all the items you touch in one day.
From the moment you wake up and get ready for school to the time you set your alarm at bedtime, you touch hundreds to thousands of surfaces. On the surfaces you touch, you most likely left behind a part of you – your unique fingerprint.
How often do you see the fingerprints you leave behind? In this lesson, you will learn how investigators find fingerprints – both hidden and visible – and collect them from the scene of the crime.
Following successful completion of this lesson, students will be able to...
- Describe various ways in which fingerprints can be retrieved from the scene of a crime.
Essential Questions
- How can fingerprints at the scene be located and enhanced for analysis?
Enduring Understandings
- Evidence must be collected in a specific and strategic manner, as well as systematically documented, to ensure that no tampering or contamination occurs.
- An exchange of material will occur whenever someone is at a crime scene (Locard's Exchange Principle). Materials left behind (or carried away) from the crime scene as well as markings and impressions from those items can be linked to an individual or item.
The above objectives correspond with the Alabama Course of Study: Forensic Science and Crime Scene Investigation standards: 26, 27, 28.