Forrest, Noreen Patricia

  Events

• Occupation, Oct 2009. .
I've written a piece about my job as a Fingerprint Expert which might be useful info for my page of the Family Tree. Happy reading!
With fond love Noreen
Usually my job as a Fingerprint Expert involves trying to identify crime scene marks.
Crime scene marks come to the Fingerprint Bureau as 'lifts' (where a Scenes of Crime Officer has powdered a surface to reveal a mark and lifted it using a low adhesive tape or gel) or as photographs of chemically developed marks (where property that may have been touched by an offender \endash such as plastic bags, cowling, paper, weapons, etc \endash has been recovered and a Laboratory Technician has used chemicals to reveal any latent/invisible marks in sweat which are then photographed).
I compare the crime scene marks first against the fingerprints of the 'injured party', or anyone else with 'legitimate access', to eliminate marks that do not belong to the potential offender(s).
I then compare any remaining marks against the fingerprints of any suspects put forward by investigating officers.
Finally, any suitable outstanding marks are searched electronically against the national collection of arrestee fingerprint forms. This involves scanning and encoding the crime scene mark (ie plotting the points within the fingerprint where a ridge stops or splits in two; and deciding what finger(s) or thumb(s) or piece of palm may have left that mark). Provided I can plot at least 8 'characteristics', I can launch a speculative search against the local/regional/national database of fingerprint forms. In the UK nationally, over 7 million individuals have their fingerprints on record, so a mark can be searched against all of these and up to 15 respondents are returned within minutes. It isn't as TV programmes such as 'CSI' would have you believe \endash the computer doesn't orientate and match the fingerprints for you! It doesn't use patterns or lines to find matches. It treats the plotted points as a grid system and returns 15 respondent fingerprints with a confidence rating of low/medium/high depending on how many points it has found to share a similar relationship to one another. It is then up to the Fingerprint Expert to decide whether the mark and the print are from the same person. If they are found to match, a hard copy of that individual's fingerprints is used to compare against all the outstanding marks in the case. Much of this comparison work is done through a magnifying glass.
All marks that are identified to a potential offender must then be independently checked and verified by two further Fingerprint Experts. This task can be painstaking \endash marks left by offenders at crime scenes are never left intentionally and are usually poor quality. If many marks are submitted, every scrap of ridge detail must be checked and accounted for. When it comes to giving evidence in Court, the defence may argue that unidentified marks belong to the 'real offender' so we do our utmost to identify everything possible. There is no numerical standard for court anymore (it used to be that marks that contained less than 16 characteristics could not be used as evidence, unless in certain exceptional circumstances). Nowadays we use what we term an 'holistic approach' where we take all the available information into account. The scientific basis of biological uniqueness means that no two human beings will ever share the same fingerprints, so a minimum number for court has no basis in logic or science. (And being the mother of identical twins, I have first-hand experience of this!) So, Fingerprint Experts use their experience and a scientific methodology of analysis, comparison, evaluation and verification to decide whether a mark has sufficient unique characteristics/features to be certain of being a match to the fingerprints of a given individual. We may even use sweat pores and ridge shapes to aid our identification. When we stand up in court to give evidence we are in no doubt that the crime scene mark was made by the defendant. A Fingerprint Expert must remain totally impartial. We provide evidence or opinion regarding identification only \endash that the mark was made by the person. We do not provide evidence or opinion of the defendant's guilt/innocence in respect of the offence \endash it is up to them to explain to the judge/jury under what circumstances their fingerprints have been left at the crime scene.
But probably the hardest part of a Fingerprint Expert's job is identifying a deceased person, where facial identification is impossible. I was called out to identify the fingerprints of a teenage girl who had been reported missing from a hospital 2 weeks previously. Her body had been found beneath an electricity pylon by a dog walker. The post mortem concluded her injuries were consistent with having fallen from a significant height. Whilst she was wearing clothes that matched the description of the missing person, the only way to formally identify her quickly was by her fingerprints. I did my job, called out two other experts to verify the identification, and trusted that at least I had helped to speed up the process of giving her parents or loved ones confirmation that she had been found. But, when I returned home, I did reflect on the desperation that that poor girl must have felt and what she may have gone through. It is difficult in those circumstances to feel or be impartial and those identifications I always remember.
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Noreen married Robin Cattle, son of Nigel Selwyn Cattle and Hanny Christen, on Jun 13, 1992 in Ludwick Way, Methodist Church, Welwyn Garden City, UK. (Robin Cattle was born on Jan 13, 1960 in Marlborough UK.)