Introduction
Watch the video Inside the Crime Lab: Latent Print Unit below from 1:22 to 2:20 to learn how the Denver Police Crime Lab runs latent prints through multiple databases to check for a potential match.
Open Inside the Crime Lab: Latent Print Unit
While databases can be used to find potential matches, the final analysis is completed by a trained examiner. In this lesson, you will learn a bit more about these databases before acting as an examiner yourself in a fingerprint virtual lab.
Following successful completion of this lesson, students will be able to...
- Utilize appropriate methods to collect fingerprints from various surfaces.
- Analyze prints to determine if there is a match between collected and known prints.
- Prepare a report of your findings.
Essential Questions
- How can fingerprints at the scene be located and enhanced for analysis?
- What do fingerprint analysts look for when trying to match a fingerprint to that of a suspect?
- What is the difference between processing and analyzing evidence?
- What is the proper way to document information from a laboratory analysis? What should be included on this report?
Enduring Understandings
- 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.
- Forensics requires a team of practitioners representing all areas of science.
- The principles of scientific inquiry are required in all crime scene and forensic science analysis.
- Forensic results are open to the interpretation and subject to the limitation of the pathologist's knowledge and methods.
- Evidence must be collected in a specific and strategic manner, as well as systematically documented, to ensure that no tampering or contamination occurs.
The above objectives correspond with the Alabama Course of Study: Forensic Science and Crime Scene Investigation standards: 26, 27, 28, 43.