SCIENCE AND CRIME DETECTION

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28210, 23 February 1957, Page 6

SCIENCE AND CRIME DETECTION

Fingerprinting Was First Suggested In 1823 ULTRA-MODERN METHODS OF ESTABLISHING PROOF [Specially written for “The Press” by A. C. ALLAN] TN the records of the world's police forces the number of unsolved crimes must be legion. But in the long history of criminal investigation and detection, how many of the wrongdoers who eluded punishment in the past through lack of evidence would have met their just deserts had they committed their offences in the modern age of forensic science—that science which in recent years has trapped innumerable scoundrels who would otherwise have escaped the penalty of the law? It was a scientist who, in 1823, advocated at Breslau University in Germany, a system of classification by fingerprints. His name was Purkinje, a professor of physiology, but his recommendations aroused little interest at the time.

In fact, fingerprinting as a system of identification had been used many centuries before then. In the ancient East, potentates had made impressions with their thumbs on documents as a prooi of the authenticity of those documents. The system, however, had never been adapted as a means of detecting criminals in their handiwork. It was in the East, though—in Bengal, to be precise—-that a method of fingerprint identification was first used-- in police work, under an Irishman, Sir Edward R. Henry, who was later to become Chief Commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police.

Born in 1850, he died in 1931, and the method of fingerprintidentification employed by him is the basis of the system in use today by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation, which boasts the largest collection of fingerprint records. But much more spectacular, much more involved, and of far greater import than fingerprint detection, are the ultra-modern aids to crime investigation which are provided nowadays by scientists in police laboratories. Microscope Study Careful, microscopic study of the scene of a crime is the very basis of present-day investigation. Bloodstains, human hairs, cloth fibres, dust, types of soil, and many other details besides fingerprints and footprints, can afford the clues from which laboratory analysis may trace the criminal and bring about his conviction in a court of justice. And but for modern science, how easy it would be for the cunning malefactor to carry out an act of villainy and escape the

consequences of “losing” him. self among the mass of —especially in this day and age o* crowded towns and cities of speedy travel.

In one murder case in recent years a bloodstained shoe, worn by the culprit during weeks of rainy weather subsequent to the killing of his victim, was a decisive factor wh m it came into the possession of the scientists. The amount of blood left on the shoe after more than a month of adverse climatic conditions was infinitesimal. Yet it was identified and checked against the murdered person’s blood-group, and proved to be a clue that fitted conclusively into the chain of evidence which led to retribution for that particular criminal In another case, examination of a suspect’s finger-nails disclosed a number of minute wool fibres which accurately matched the wool of a garment worn by a woman he had done to death. Meticulous Scrutiny Glass splinters from a broken window can lodge in the clothing of an offender and establish his guilt. Under the meticulous scrutiny of scientists, different kinds of glass can be identified by their composition, their special and individual properties. An instrument known as a spectograph is used for this work. Photographic techniques are invaluable in modern crime investigation, of course. Microscopy, ultra-violet light, infra-red light—these are also of inestimable assistance to the researchers whose task it is to help the police in closing the net round a wrongdoer. The sleuth in popular fiction is so often a character with •brilliant powers of deduction. In real life, too, the police officer may delve shrewdly into the realms of theory in the handling of a case. But the “back-room” scien-

tists deal only with facts—incontrovertible facts which are revealed in their laboratories and which can prove (or disprove) the deductions of the men who are in the forefront of the fight against crime, the detectives of a force.

Such scientists and the apparatus with which they work are indeed instruments of justice in an unending battle of wits.