بصمات الأصابع ، بين الشرطة والعلم - ١ - كتاب في سبيل موسوعة علمية .. الدكتور أحمد ذكي

Fingerprints... between the police and science - 1 -

A woman was walking on the road, and a man met her and spoke to her for a few seconds, then he snatched her handbag and turned away. The woman screams. But the man had a car waiting for him and it quickly disappeared. People did not understand anything about the car.

The police come looking.
The police's way of doing this is that they keep the names of all the criminals in the neighborhood, and they know that the criminal must return to the same crime, so the first thing they do is show the woman with the bag pictures of these criminals, so that she may recognize one of them and say, yes, this is the kidnapper. The police may bring some suspects, and may mix them with others, with the intention of identifying the kidnapper.

We say this is the police method, and it is the old police method that does not keep pace with time. Especially when the crime is more serious than kidnapping a bag, such as murder, for example.

- In human memory

Here the researcher intervenes in the validity or invalidity of this method, in human memory, how much is it true, and how long does a person need to look in order to remember, and then after that for how long can the memory retain the image or images that it saw.

It has been shown that human memory varies from person to person. Often, her passion enters her from where she does not know, and she sees crimes in a person and thinks that she has seen him. People believe it, the police believe it, and then it turns out that this person was such that she could never have seen him.

- London in the late last century

We now move in history to London, at the end of the last century.

In London, its police officers established general rules for identifying criminals, and they invented the same experiments they invented, and then other nations copied from them what they had achieved, without much modification and distortion.

Identifying the criminal there, at the end of the last century, as was the case in the rest of the world, was not easy to follow. There were no rules.

The innocence or conviction of the criminal, even in incidents of violence and murder, was based on the testimony of witnesses, other than the police, who claimed to have seen him with his own eyes from the police.

Tragic incidents occurred because of this. From that
A man, whose name is Adolph Be, was witnessed by women. They discovered him afterward, and it was ruled that he had defrauded them, and robbed them of money and other things on the way. They called the police, who arrested him and imprisoned him for five years. Then let go. After many years, something happens to some women like what happened the first time, and they meet the same man on the way. He is imprisoned for 7 years. Then while he was in prison, the crime continued in this same manner. Then it becomes clear that the man is imprisoned. He is innocent, and the criminal is someone else. The criminal is arrested.

Newspapers curse the police, curse the government, and say, “In the era of science (this was in the last decade of the last century) something like this happens!” ?

- A committee of police and scholars in 1894

In 1894, the British government established a committee to look into: How can one who is habitually criminal be identified, and how to compose a record that contains the characteristics of the criminal or suspect, ensuring that it is referred to when needed, so that the innocent is not accused of a crime other than the innocent.

There was a man in France called Alphonse Bertillon, who was the head of the criminal registry in Paris, and he devised a system for registering criminals based on the opinions of Professor Lombrose in Turin, Italy. This system requires taking accurate measurements of the bodies of offenders in their prisons, so that if they return to crime, they can be identified without error. Or even if suspicion arises around them or they are accused while they are among the people at large.

The committee recommended adopting this system to register criminals and that New Scotland Yard (which is the famous name in the world, and it is the center for criminal research in Britain) open a register that includes all the descriptions mentioned by this French system.

Since 1894, all prisons began measuring the number of prisoners:
1- Head length.
2- Head width.
3- The length of the middle finger on the left hand.
4- The length of the right foot.
5- The length of the left arm.
These are the five sizes for the first sorting of criminals. In order to increase their classification after that, the following things are measured:
1 - The length of a man’s torso while sitting.
2- The length of the right ear.
3- The width of the face.
4- The length of the middle finger of the right hand.
5- Eye color.

Simple bow
The same arch in Ras Al Khaimah
Simple vortex
Central sinusoidal loop
Cambrian noose (right hand)
Ulnar ring (right hand)
Double noose
Spin-off

These are the eight main forms into which fingerprints are classified. Each of these forms has branches, and they derived branches from them, such that it became possible, if someone sent to the police a fingerprint that originated in an existing crime, for them to study it and return it to its category among those many types. Then they compared it with the fingerprints of the last type they found, and identified its owner if there was a similar one in the register. The Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States has about 170 million fingerprints stored in records.