Speaker 1: We've talked about true crime stories a lot. We talk
Speaker 1: about DNA, and we talk about different ways that cases
Speaker 1: can be built against people. One of those main ways
Speaker 1: for the last one hundred years or so, the cases
Speaker 1: have been built against criminals is fingerprints.
Speaker 2: It's where we start True Crime Tuesday.
Speaker 1: The story is true, that's true.
Speaker 3: No, it sounds made up. I don't know. Garry and
Speaker 3: Shannon present True Crime. The science of finger printing.
Speaker 1: The pattern matching of fingerprinting started back in the eighteen seventies.
Speaker 1: A guy named Henry Folds, a Scottish medical missionary who
Speaker 1: was serving in Japan, started thinking about fingerprints and while
Speaker 1: he was on an archaeological expedition with a friend, he
Speaker 1: noticed that there was a print on a clay relic
Speaker 1: and he reminded him of some stories he'd heard about merchants,
Speaker 1: Chinese merchants who were used fingerprints to sign contracts, and
Speaker 1: he said, our fingerprints really as unique as we think
Speaker 1: they are.
Speaker 4: So he started recording fingerprints using a method called nature printings.
Speaker 4: Botanets use this to document plant leaves. You may have
Speaker 4: seen this. So he smeared thin coats of printer's ink
Speaker 4: over a tin plate and carefully pressed the finger print
Speaker 4: of a fingertip of a volunteer onto the blotch, then
Speaker 4: transfer their ink finger onto a piece of paper. Now,
Speaker 4: not much has changed since good Old Henry's experience in
Speaker 4: the nineteen seventies or eighteen seventies. Excuse me, that sounds
Speaker 4: exactly like they do it, at least in the shows
Speaker 4: that the police departments.
Speaker 1: Sure, I mean, now, if you need to get fingerprinted,
Speaker 1: they can do. You know, you throw your thumb print
Speaker 1: down on a glass and they can scan the fingerprint
Speaker 1: that way. That's probably the most advanced that they've gotten
Speaker 1: when it comes to fingerprints. But over the next decade
Speaker 1: or so, again we're talking about the eighteen seventies eighteen eighties,
Speaker 1: he made thousands of these prints. He even enlisted the
Speaker 1: staff of a hospital in Tokyo. Each fingerprint that he
Speaker 1: captured appeared to be unique, and this is probably just
Speaker 1: as important. It maintained its distinct pattern over time, so
Speaker 1: as a kid got older, that pattern of loops and
Speaker 1: whirls in that individual fingerprint never changed.
Speaker 4: So his extensive and detailed collection of these fingerprints would
Speaker 4: become a key piece of evidence. Tokyo police was investigating
Speaker 4: a break in at the same hospital where he worked,
Speaker 4: and authorities identified one of Henry's own employees as a
Speaker 4: suspect and had even discovered sooty fingerprints that the intruder
Speaker 4: had left on a wall. So that employee, it turned out,
Speaker 4: had provided his fingerprints for Henry's study earlier, and when
Speaker 4: the police compared the ones from the wall to the suspects,
Speaker 4: I'd show they have the wrong person, the prince not
Speaker 4: a match.
Speaker 1: Well now, and this was exciting for the doctor. His
Speaker 1: collection could be used to help solve crimes. Bloody finger
Speaker 1: marks or impressions on clay or glass, whatever they may
Speaker 1: lead to the scientific identification of criminals. This is a
Speaker 1: letter that he wrote published in the journal Nature way
Speaker 1: back when on the skin furrows of the hand. If
Speaker 1: you're interested, you can go back and look it up.
Speaker 1: But he said, there can be no doubt as to
Speaker 1: the advantage of having, besides their photographs, a Nature copy
Speaker 1: of the forever unchanging finger furrows of important criminals.
Speaker 3: So he asked other scientists.
Speaker 1: He thought that this was going to be a major
Speaker 1: breakthrough and asked other scientists to help publicize his findings,
Speaker 1: sent observations and classification system for fingerprints too, you know
Speaker 1: a guy named Charles Darwin. Charles Darwin then shared it
Speaker 1: with his cousin, the mathematics mathematician Francis Galton, and he
Speaker 1: saw their potential of fingerprints to help solve crimes. He
Speaker 1: decided to help develop a system to classify and to
Speaker 1: analyze them.
Speaker 4: Birds of a feather, kids, This is why you should
Speaker 4: have friends that are smart, because then you too will
Speaker 4: be smart. He was the only person Henry studying fingerprints.
Speaker 4: Around the same time, there was William Herschel. He was
Speaker 4: a German born British astronomer. Astronomer excuse me, working in
Speaker 4: India had long kept fingerprints, records of them, began using
Speaker 4: them to seal contracts. And then Galton the mathematician, collected
Speaker 4: the findings of fields in Herschel and in eighteen ninety
Speaker 4: two published his own classification system. So anyway, that was
Speaker 4: a hit, and then it became widely publicized that this
Speaker 4: was a thing.
Speaker 1: There are some problems with fingerprinting, however. The loops and
Speaker 1: the whorls and the arches can shrink the pool of
Speaker 1: possible matches to somebody, but they're not nearly enough for
Speaker 1: identification for some people. The second level of analysis includes
Speaker 1: the ridges of a print.
Speaker 4: For every partial fingerprint found at a crime scene, you
Speaker 4: can find an expert witness that will take the sand
Speaker 4: and tell you that that fingerprint is not reliable.
Speaker 2: Well, now, not only.
Speaker 4: Will you have the advice of whatever expert witness was
Speaker 4: handsomely paid by the defense to take the stand and
Speaker 4: tell you that fingerprint evidence was not reliable, AI has
Speaker 4: stepped into the conversation and says that fingerprints are not unique.
Speaker 4: How will this affect cases in the future and retroactively perhaps.
Speaker 2: Hey, Gary and Shannon's Karen.
Speaker 4: Yes, the clicking of the pen super annoying, and that's
Speaker 4: all I heard.
Speaker 2: I had annoyed. It was Gary was saying.
Speaker 3: And then also, Gary, can you please talk like you're.
Speaker 2: Drunk all the time. It's great.
Speaker 4: It kills me, truly, and it just makes my date better.
Speaker 1: Okay, Okay.
Speaker 3: The irony of that.
Speaker 1: Is my wife says that she can never tell, she
Speaker 1: can never tell when I've had too much a drink ever,
Speaker 1: vocally like that.
Speaker 3: I don't I don't slur my words.
Speaker 2: Or part of it is that you don't speak.
Speaker 3: That's part of it.
Speaker 1: Because I'm super self conscious of that if I ever
Speaker 1: start to feel like, you know what, that was probably
Speaker 1: one too many and I'm going to start slurring my
Speaker 1: words here, I'll use words with hard consonants, and that's it.
Speaker 3: You don't start with a year or a. You got
Speaker 3: to start with a or a or a.
Speaker 4: Just knowing that alone is you're already a head of
Speaker 4: the game of the game about fingerprint I was just
Speaker 4: going to give you that.
Speaker 3: Oh, thank you God. I knew a lot about fingerprints,
Speaker 3: but you just educated me. Thank you so much, Thank
Speaker 3: you so much.
Speaker 1: Buckle up, buttercup, because it's going to get a little
Speaker 1: bit more interesting. So we're talking about fingerprint analysis for
Speaker 1: true crime Tuesday, right. Long been one of the the
Speaker 1: benchmarks of crime scene investigation is looking for fingerprints, and
Speaker 1: there has been a belief since fingerprinting began basically one
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty years ago, that individuals you and I,
Speaker 1: on our individual fingers have different fingerprints. For example, if
Speaker 1: I leave my thumb print on a glass and they
Speaker 1: are searching for my index finger print, that those things
Speaker 1: will not match.
Speaker 3: So that would be.
Speaker 1: You could not pin me at the crime scene because
Speaker 1: my thumb print wouldn't match my index fingerprint. So an
Speaker 1: undergraduate senior at Columbia Engineering named Gabe Gwo put together
Speaker 1: a study where he fed into this thing about sixty
Speaker 1: into a database about sixty thousand fingerprints, and there were
Speaker 1: certain pairs of fingerprints that did belong to the same
Speaker 1: person from different fingers, but that they belonged to the
Speaker 1: same person. The AI system was able to tell at
Speaker 1: a surprisingly high rate when prints that looked different actually
Speaker 1: came from the same person, so that you would be
Speaker 1: able to tell from a thumb print what the index
Speaker 1: print looked like, or which of those was the match
Speaker 1: from the same person.
Speaker 3: And that's just with sixty thousand fingerprints. They're saying.
Speaker 1: Now, imagine how specific and how accurate it would be
Speaker 1: if it had access to millions of fingerprints and not
Speaker 1: just tens of thousands.
Speaker 4: This is a problem when it comes to the peer
Speaker 4: review process. This was rejected this project by a well
Speaker 4: established forensics journal did not accept the suggestion that different
Speaker 4: fingers might produce prints with shared characteristics. The paper was
Speaker 4: turned away again when it went to get a second opinion.
Speaker 4: So to speak, this is more than one hundred years
Speaker 4: of accepted practice that you're trying to disrupt and overturn,
Speaker 4: but it was finally recognized, the study was and published
Speaker 4: and the peer reviewed journal Science Advances. So reticent to
Speaker 4: change the scientific community is, but nevertheless open to the possibility.
Speaker 4: It's funny that the scientific community would push back on
Speaker 4: something like this.
Speaker 3: They don't like to be proven wrong.
Speaker 1: But that's the whole point of science is to then
Speaker 1: ask the questions of is this right? Does this work?
Speaker 1: Can we make it better? All of those things right?
Speaker 1: And if I die is going to help us do that,
Speaker 1: then that's probably a good use of it.
Speaker 2: I wonder what you would say about this if you
Speaker 2: were drunk.
Speaker 1: I would say I would say that the if you
Speaker 1: if you get your stop looking at my fingers.
Speaker 3: I don't know what I would say a drunk