While DNA technology is the most important forensic advance of recent years, it is far from the only one. Science and technology are becoming vital parts of criminal investigations in other ways as well.
Cops say the benefits of new systems of automated fingerprint identification have been breathtaking, cracking years-old, stone- cold cases all over the country. The AFIS process provides computerized storage and rapid matching of new prints against a police department's or a state's entire inventory -- perhaps millions of fingerprint records. In the old days, fingerprint examiners could never go through such large inventories, so latent prints recovered from a crime scene were helpful only if suspects were already identified. But AFIS can whiz through 1,200 prints per second and in a few hours kick out possible matches, yielding suspects the cops never knew about. A fingerprint examiner must still certify an exact match.
"Tickled pink." Last year, the Cleveland Police Department's AFIS process identified a suspect in a six-year-old shooting of a suburban officer -- one of several hundred cases the local AFIS has assisted since 1990. "We're tickled pink," says Victor Kovacic, the department's superintendent of criminalistics.
AFIS technology began to spread dramatically in the mid-1980s. Many large departments and about 40 states now have it, and the FBI has launched a $661 million project to convert its 30 million fingerprint cards into a national AFIS database.
The FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms hope the same sort of thing can be done for the unique markings guns leave on bullets and shell casings. The ATF has recently begun using a computerized system called Bulletproof -- developed by a Canadian company -- which takes a 360-degree picture of a bullet's ballistic characteristics, then compares it with others stored in a database to isolate a small universe of potential matches. "We're literally able through automation to do the grunt work of a small army of forensic examiners," says ATF spokesman Jack Killorin. A pilot project using the system has linked about a dozen shootings in Washington, D.C., since December.
Analysis of blood spattering is also advancing as a forensic discipline. The angle and force of blows a victim suffers affect the size, shape and position of blood spatter, helping detectives to reconstruct the crime. Forensic voice analysis, too, is increasingly popular. With a device called a voice spectrograph, investigators can generate "pictures" of recorded voices that graphically display fluctuations in pitch and tone, and then compare them with others -- though not all courts have accepted voice spectrograms as evidence. Finally, obtaining fingerprints has become easier, thanks to a recently developed hand-held wand that disperses a cyanoacrylate fluorescent dye vapor over surfaces being examined. The vapor reacts with the moisture and oil of the fingerprint, freezing the print so it cannot be harmed.
None of this is a substitute, of course, for good detective work, or a little luck. But advances in forensic science are clearly helping. And these days cops need all the help they can get.
