We've talked about true crime stories a lot. We talk about DNA, and we talk about different ways that cases can be built against people. One of those main ways for the last one hundred years or so, the cases have been built against criminals is fingerprints.
It's where we start True Crime Tuesday.
The story is true, that's true.
No, it sounds made up. I don't know. Garry and Shannon present True Crime. The science of finger printing.
The pattern matching of fingerprinting started back in the eighteen seventies.
A guy named Henry Folds, a Scottish medical missionary who was serving in Japan, started thinking about fingerprints and while he was on an archaeological expedition with a friend, he noticed that there was a print on a clay relic and he reminded him of some stories he'd heard about merchants, Chinese merchants who were used fingerprints to sign contracts, and he said, our fingerprints really as unique as we think they are.
So he started recording fingerprints using a method called nature printings. Botanets use this to document plant leaves. You may have seen this. So he smeared thin coats of printer's ink over a tin plate and carefully pressed the finger print of a fingertip of a volunteer onto the blotch, then transfer their ink finger onto a piece of paper. Now, not much has changed since good Old Henry's experience in
the nineteen seventies or eighteen seventies. Excuse me, that sounds exactly like they do it, at least in the shows that the police departments.
Sure, I mean, now, if you need to get fingerprinted, they can do. You know, you throw your thumb print down on a glass and they can scan the fingerprint that way. That's probably the most advanced that they've gotten when it comes to fingerprints. But over the next decade or so, again we're talking about the eighteen seventies eighteen eighties, he made thousands of these prints. He even enlisted the
staff of a hospital in Tokyo. Each fingerprint that he captured appeared to be unique, and this is probably just as important. It maintained its distinct pattern over time, so as a kid got older, that pattern of loops and whirls in that individual fingerprint never changed.
So his extensive and detailed collection of these fingerprints would become a key piece of evidence. Tokyo police was investigating a break in at the same hospital where he worked, and authorities identified one of Henry's own employees as a suspect and had even discovered sooty fingerprints that the intruder
had left on a wall. So that employee, it turned out, had provided his fingerprints for Henry's study earlier, and when the police compared the ones from the wall to the suspects, I'd show they have the wrong person, the prince not a match.
Well now, and this was exciting for the doctor. His collection could be used to help solve crimes. Bloody finger marks or impressions on clay or glass, whatever they may lead to the scientific identification of criminals. This is a letter that he wrote published in the journal Nature way back when on the skin furrows of the hand. If you're interested, you can go back and look it up.
But he said, there can be no doubt as to the advantage of having, besides their photographs, a Nature copy of the forever unchanging finger furrows of important criminals.
So he asked other scientists.
He thought that this was going to be a major breakthrough and asked other scientists to help publicize his findings, sent observations and classification system for fingerprints too, you know a guy named Charles Darwin. Charles Darwin then shared it with his cousin, the mathematics mathematician Francis Galton, and he saw their potential of fingerprints to help solve crimes. He decided to help develop a system to classify and to analyze them.
Birds of a feather, kids, This is why you should have friends that are smart, because then you too will be smart. He was the only person Henry studying fingerprints. Around the same time, there was William Herschel. He was a German born British astronomer. Astronomer excuse me, working in India had long kept fingerprints, records of them, began using them to seal contracts. And then Galton the mathematician, collected the findings of fields in Herschel and in eighteen ninety
two published his own classification system. So anyway, that was a hit, and then it became widely publicized that this was a thing.
There are some problems with fingerprinting, however. The loops and the whorls and the arches can shrink the pool of possible matches to somebody, but they're not nearly enough for identification for some people. The second level of analysis includes the ridges of a print.
For every partial fingerprint found at a crime scene, you can find an expert witness that will take the sand and tell you that that fingerprint is not reliable.
Well, now, not only.
Will you have the advice of whatever expert witness was handsomely paid by the defense to take the stand and tell you that fingerprint evidence was not reliable, AI has stepped into the conversation and says that fingerprints are not unique. How will this affect cases in the future and retroactively perhaps.
Hey, Gary and Shannon's Karen.
Yes, the clicking of the pen super annoying, and that's all I heard.
I had annoyed. It was Gary was saying.
And then also, Gary, can you please talk like you're.
Drunk all the time. It's great.
It kills me, truly, and it just makes my date better.
Okay, Okay.
The irony of that.
Is my wife says that she can never tell, she can never tell when I've had too much a drink ever, vocally like that.
I don't I don't slur my words.
Or part of it is that you don't speak.
That's part of it.
Because I'm super self conscious of that if I ever start to feel like, you know what, that was probably one too many and I'm going to start slurring my words here, I'll use words with hard consonants, and that's it.
You don't start with a year or a. You got to start with a or a or a.
Just knowing that alone is you're already a head of the game of the game about fingerprint I was just going to give you that.
Oh, thank you God. I knew a lot about fingerprints, but you just educated me. Thank you so much, Thank you so much.
Buckle up, buttercup, because it's going to get a little bit more interesting. So we're talking about fingerprint analysis for true crime Tuesday, right. Long been one of the the benchmarks of crime scene investigation is looking for fingerprints, and there has been a belief since fingerprinting began basically one hundred and fifty years ago, that individuals you and I,
on our individual fingers have different fingerprints. For example, if I leave my thumb print on a glass and they are searching for my index finger print, that those things will not match.
So that would be.
You could not pin me at the crime scene because my thumb print wouldn't match my index fingerprint. So an undergraduate senior at Columbia Engineering named Gabe Gwo put together a study where he fed into this thing about sixty into a database about sixty thousand fingerprints, and there were certain pairs of fingerprints that did belong to the same person from different fingers, but that they belonged to the
same person. The AI system was able to tell at a surprisingly high rate when prints that looked different actually came from the same person, so that you would be able to tell from a thumb print what the index print looked like, or which of those was the match from the same person.
And that's just with sixty thousand fingerprints. They're saying.
Now, imagine how specific and how accurate it would be if it had access to millions of fingerprints and not just tens of thousands.
This is a problem when it comes to the peer review process. This was rejected this project by a well established forensics journal did not accept the suggestion that different fingers might produce prints with shared characteristics. The paper was turned away again when it went to get a second opinion. So to speak, this is more than one hundred years of accepted practice that you're trying to disrupt and overturn, but it was finally recognized, the study was and published
and the peer reviewed journal Science Advances. So reticent to change the scientific community is, but nevertheless open to the possibility. It's funny that the scientific community would push back on something like this.
They don't like to be proven wrong.
But that's the whole point of science is to then ask the questions of is this right? Does this work? Can we make it better? All of those things right? And if I die is going to help us do that, then that's probably a good use of it.
I wonder what you would say about this if you were drunk.
I would say I would say that the if you if you get your stop looking at my fingers.
I don't know what I would say a drunk