Pat Wertheim on LinkedIn: #fingerprints #inkedprints #livescan | 12 comments (2024)

After my webinar a couple of weeks ago, Kathleen Saviers emailed me and asked why, if I love fingerprints so much, am I glad to be retired.Max Planck, a leading German physicist of the early 20th Century, commented in 1917, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponentseventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." I like to put it more bluntly: "Old scientists never change; they just have to die."When I first got into fingerprints, the idea that "there is no minimum number of points" was just being accepted. I was part of a "new generation" that grew up with that concept. The old timers firmly believed in the mandate for "8 points," or whatever magic number they had been taught. For my generation, though, David Ashbaugh defined “Ridgeology” as a balance of quality and quantity of detail, not just quantity alone.Then along came DNA, and lawyers and academicians began asking why don't all forensic sciences use statistics? That idea began to blossom after the NAS Report in 2010. The OSACs were formed and the old SWGs and TWGs were relegated to the history books of the late 20th Century.In his 1962 book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," Thomas Kuhn coined the term "paradigm shift" to describe the same concept that Max Planck had referredto in 1917. Kuhn says "normal science" is the use of a set of agreed upon rules by which a group of practitioners answer small daily questions. That is a perfect description of latent print comparison. Each comparison is a small daily question. Kuhn says a crisis arises when a new question comes along that cannot be answered by the old rules. The old practitioners will not change, but new people coming into the business will devise new rules that answer the new question. Then a "scientific revolution" occurs as new people insist on their new rules. The old timers prevail for a while, but as they leave the field (i.e., die off), eventually the new kids take over. The process from the framing of the new question through the final tipping of the scales to accept the new rules is the "paradigm shift."Starting with the use of statistics in DNA, the seed of a paradigm shift in forensic science was planted. It has been watered and fertilized by the new practitioners as we old timers leave the field. I'm a victim of Max Planck's curse. It is distasteful for me to surrender the rules under which I have practiced for fifty years. I still believe in a non-numeric, non-statistical threshold for identification. And I will maintain that I am entitled to my "opinion" of identification under Rule 702 in spite of the paradigm shift to statistics & likelihood ratios. That's why I'm glad I'm out of the field. I'd rather take my dogs to the dog park to play with their puppy friends while I listen to audiobooks, than stubbornly stay in the losing battle against statistical analysis in fingerprints.

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Are you a CLPE or LPE losing ground to inflation? Looking for a jump in pay plus outstanding benefits? This might be the opportunity you are looking for:For more information, contact:Angela PrattPhysical ScientistCustoms and Border ProtectionLaboratories and Scientific Services202-591-5868 (cell)Angela.R.Pratt@cbp.dhs.gov

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Many thanks to Cameron Triboulet and W. D. Jenkins Private Security (https://lnkd.in/gxgNjAkj) for the invitation to attend the Texas Business Owners and Executives (T-BOE) mixer. I felt like I was a little out of my league in the crowd of amazing young entrepreneurs who have started their own companies and built amazing business organizations in a wide variety of fields from construction to transportation to training to marketing, and many more. Just listening to the conversations among these vibrant young business owners convinced me that the future of the United States is in good hands, indeed, with this new generation of leaders.

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I got extremely angry - totally pissed off, really - one night about 2:30 AM when I arrived at a hotel to process a rape scene in a room and found an unconscious woman in one of the beds. Plano Police Department policy included a requirement for an officer who called out the Crime Scene Unit to remain on the scene until the CSI Technician (civilian) arrived. So here I was, a civilian CSI with an unconscious woman in my scene while the officer had already left – against policy! Was I even in the right room?I got the shift sergeant on the radio and raised hell. I did NOT want to be the only one there if the drunk woman regained consciousness and became hysterical or combative with me. The officer returned to the scene.The story was that two women had gone to a bar to pick up guys, then went to a hotel for one-night stands. One of the women was too drunk and passed out before consummating the act. Her guy had left in disgust. The second couple had gotten into the program when the guy became abusive and the woman called it off. But then the guy got violent, slapped her around, and raped her before leaving. The first woman was in the other bed unconscious the whole time the rape was going on. The officer explained that he had called an ambulance as soon as he arrived. The EMTs had tended to both the rape victim and the drunk. They determined that the drunk was in no danger of anything except a world-class hangover and suggested just leaving her there to sleep it off. They took the rape victim to the ER for exam and rape kit.I went ahead and processed the hotel room as one would normally handle a rape scene. As for the drunk woman, I placed a yellow evidence marker next to her head on the pillow to designate her as an item of evidence in the crime scene photographs. She was still out cold when I cleared the scene and locked the door behind me.I wrote a memo to the Chief the next morning regarding officers not remaining at the scene after they had called out ID. We were civilians, we were unarmed, and we had no authority to act if things went south after the officer had departed. I was not worried for myself. After all, I had been an officer for eleven years before going civilian to supervise the ID Unit and do latent prints full time. But I had several young ID Techs straight out of high school on their first job and I knew it could be disastrous if one of them got into some kind of altercation in a situation such as that hotel room that night, or any other call out where a perp might return, or even one where a victim became emotional and disorderly.Two reminders: 1.) I will be leading a webinar on Detection of Forged and Fabricated Latent Print Evidence on Wednesday, June 12. For more information or to register, check here: https://lnkd.in/gmK7Miyi2.) You can find all of my past stories in the Blog section of my website, https://lnkd.in/gXgAkUD7.

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We had a kinder, gentler way of dealing with homeless people and transients in the 1970s in Kerrville, Texas where I was first a police officer. Anybody who was living on the streets and wanted a place to sleep could come to the police station any evening and request to sleep in the city jail.The jail at that time consisted of five or six spartan, steel walled cells with doors that had windows only big enough to peer through to check on occupants. There were steel bunks with thin cotton mattresses, steel toilets, and steel sinks. It was the polar opposite of luxury, but for people with no other place to sleep except outdoors, it offered a warm, dry place on cold, rainy nights.A local restaurant fixed breakfast plates every morning for everybody in jail. The dispatcher would call with the number of plates needed and an officer would go by and pick them up. They would still be warm when we handed them through the little windows to the occupants.We called the folks who were simply spending the night there “sleepers.” I’m sure that if a Kerrville police officer today went back to the book-in cards prior to the late 1970s, they would find a significant percentage of the persons booked into jail during a year’s time were sleepers. Once they had finished their breakfasts, they were released back into freedom, no charges filed and no charge for the room and board. Like I said, it was a kinder, gentler place back then, my Texas of the 1970s. With the population of homeless people today, I can’t imagine police departments would still extend the courtesy of accepting sleepers and giving them free breakfast. I don’t imagine large cities did it, even back then. Sometime in the late 1970s, we quit accepting sleepers. The chief explained that in another city that took in homeless people on bad nights, one of the sleepers had awakened one morning with a toothache. I don’t know the whole story – perhaps a reader does and can fill in the details in the comments below – but the upshot of it was that a lawsuit ensued and the court found that once the jail booked a person in as a sleeper, it became responsible for his needs including any medical attention he required before he was released the next morning.A lot of good things get ruined by one person demanding too much. As we were told, the city where that event occurred was on the hook for major dental work for the one-night sleeper but every other city in the good old USA that had allowed sleepers immediately stopped the practice. Reminder to my contacts and followers – all of my weekly posts are entered into the Blog section of my website, www.patwertheim.com, as I post them here every Sunday evening. If you are new to my weekly posts and would like to read some of the earlier stories, please check them out there. I tell of things I did wrong as well as things I got right, in hopes my younger readers will think of situations and be better prepared if they find themselves in similar circ*mstances.

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Webinar on forged & fabricated fingerprint evidence.When: June 12, Wednesday.What: Valuable information for criminal justice professionals.Who: Latent Print Examiners (IAI credit for CLPE training), Criminal Defense Attorneys, Defense Investigators, Private Investigators, authors of crime fiction, and any other professional involved in crimes involving fingerprint evidence.Topics: Three methods corrupt cops use to fabricate fingerprint evidence and three methods crooks use to forge fingerprints. Red Flags: clues to be on the lookout for that might indicate fabricated evidence or forged fingerprints.Case studies: Dozens, even hundreds, of cases will be discussed taken from the literature and from the presenter's own experience investigating these crimes.Register here: https://lnkd.in/gmK7Miyi#CLPE #criminaldefense #crimeinvestigation #latentprints #fingerprints #privateinvestigation #defenseinvestigators #crimescene #csi #truecrime#authors

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#FabricatedEvidence occurs in fingerprint cases far more often than #misattributions, or so my experience during a half-century in the fingerprint business informs me. I have testified for #CriminalDefense in both kinds of cases, but in more latent fingerprint fabrications than in erroneous identifications. My research into latent #FingerprintForgeries and fabrications revealed three methods of forging latent prints and, likewise, three methods of fabricating evidence. The subjects of fingerprint forgery and latent print fabrication are two entirely different concepts and should never be confused.I will be instructing an 8-hour webinar on the topics of latent print fabrication and fingerprint forgery on Wednesday, June 12, from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM, Central Daylight Time. I will detail all three methods of forgery and all three methods of fabrication, plus cover all of the clues to be on the lookout for when conducting latent print examinations. In addition, I will discuss numerous cases of corrupt police officers fabricating fingerprint evidence in order to bolster a case or even frame an innocent person.The course is approved for credit by the IAI for the relevant certification programs. If you are a #FingerprintExaminer, #LatentPrintExaminer, or #CLPE, this course will help prepare you to detect false evidence submitted to you for examination.This webinar also contains valuable information for any #DefenseAttorney who represents clients in felony cases when fingerprint evidence is present.For more information or to register, see:https://lnkd.in/gmK7Miyi

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When I was a patrol sergeant at Plano Police Department, I came up with a novel way to motivate my officers and give them each a little reward once a month. When an officer did something particularly noteworthy during the week, I would let him check out an unmarked vehicle and watch a liquor store on a Friday or Saturday night to catch minors buying booze, then file the paperwork to suspend the store’s liquor license.The department had a Pontiac Trans Am seized in a narcotics deal and invariably, that was the car the lucky officer would pick on his night to play undercover surveillance cop. There were any number of small liquor stores in the strip shopping centers where you could set up halfway across the parking lot and watch through binoculars. I don’t think any of my officers ever came up dry when they got a chance to work the liquor stores.I remember one time when I came in on my day off to play the game myself. Instead of the Trans Am, I picked the beat up old panel van. We had several sets of magnetic signs to stick on the side to pose as an electrician’s van, a plumber’s van, or one or two other businesses. I think I was using the electrician’s signs on the van the night in question.A car pulled up in front of the liquor store I was watching about 10:00 PM. Three girls got out and went into the store, then came back out a few minutes later with a couple of bags and got into their car. Unbelievably, they pulled across the parking lot and parked in the spot directly next to me.It was a hot night and I had the windows open on the van. I leaned back and pressed myself into the seat to try and make myself invisible. Their car windows were down, too, and I could hear their conversation crystal clear. The driver turned on the dome light and they began pulling the beer cans out of the twelve-packs and wrapping the cans with clinging plastic labels that said “Caca Cola." They were laughing about the clever way of outsmarting cops. On casual inspection, the cans looked everything in the world like co*ke cans.From the girls’ conversation, I learned that the clerk knew they were underaged and he kept a stash of the "Caca Cola" labels under the counter for occasions when minors came in to buy beer. As soon as the girls had started to drive off, I radioed one of my officers in the district. He stopped the car about six blocks away and shocked the hell out of them by knowing exactly what they had in the car and how they had got it. He ticketed each of them for minor in possession. In spite of the fact that some of them feigned ignorance of the beer, I had clearly seen the whole group go into the store and heard them laughing about it less than ten feet from where I sat watching them put on the fake labels.We drew a healthy license suspension on the store for knowingly selling to minors that night and enabling them to disguise the beer cans. I don’t think the girls ever learned how the officer who stopped them had known what they were up to.

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The most outlandish case I was ever asked to investigate as a private fingerprint consultant was the bizarre case of Leonardo da Vinci’s reincarnation.To my new contacts and followers, I post here every Sunday night with a story from my career dating back to 1973. I tell of things I got right and some that I got terribly wrong, in hopes that my readers will think about the situations I recount and be better prepared if they ever find themselves in similar straits.But back to the strange case of Leonardo da Vinci. I received a call from a woman who wanted to meet with me to discuss fingerprints in the paint on the works of Leonardo da Vinci. I was living in Salem, Oregon at the time. She lived out of state and she asked if I could meet her in Portland. Something about her approach intrigued me and I said I would. I asked her to name the place and time. She named a certain microbrewery and designated a time and evening for the meeting.When I showed up and we met face to face, she finally explained the examination she wanted me to conduct. She had an intense dream in which she was climbing a scaffold in the refectory of the Dominican convent of Santa Maria delle Graziein Milan, Italy. In her dream, she was stretching her arm out with a brush and painting the Last Supper. She told me the dream was so vivid that she knew she must be the reincarnation of Leonardo da Vinci. In her dream, she maintained that she was reliving what she had once experienced in real life. She wanted me to fingerprint her, then compare her prints to those in paint on known works of Leonardo to confirm that she was, in fact, Leonardo reincarnated. She went on to explain that Leonardo was actually a woman and was the greatest male impersonator in history, and that the Mona Lisa was her self-portrait. Who am I to dispute the idea of reincarnation, accepted as true by millions if not billions of people around the world? I decided to treat the request seriously and refrained from commenting that she looked nothing like the Mona Lisa to me. I spent a couple of months reading up on the old masters’ use of their fingers in their paintings and learned that they often used a little paint on a fingertip to shade or add background texture to a painting. In modern times, look at the amazing portraits painted by Jennifer Hannaford using nothing but her fingertips. But for all the high-resolution images I could find of Leonardo’s paintings, none had a sufficiently large area of friction skin impression to conduct a comparison with any hope of reaching a conclusion. Some had friction ridge detail to be sure, but such tiny and overlapping fragments as to preclude any kind of reasonable examination.In the end I issued a report to the client that summarized my findings as inconclusive due to insufficient friction ridge skin detail for a comparison in any of Leonardo’s paintings. I ended my report with a philosophical comment that perhaps some mysteries are never meant to be solved.

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