| Author | Message | ||
     Webmaster |
The short answer is no. If there were a variance in the occurrence of fingerprint patterns of criminals versus the general public, it would have been obvious in the separate (but co-located) civil and criminal manually classified fingerprint files maintained by many large police agencies worldwide (not just by the FBI) before AFIS. Despite what palm readers might allege, the friction ridges permanently formed into intricate patterns before birth do not provide a road map of a person's predisposition toward crime. Scientists cannot even differentiate male from female impressions based only on fingerprint pattern (classification) types. Some birth defects, such as the shortened little fingers and palmar simian creases often associated with mongolism, can be represented in friction skin. However, generally such birth defects are also readily visible through other physical traits. Common sense tells investigators discovering large hand prints or large barefoot prints that the donor is probably an adult male or a large adult female. | ||
| Michele Triplett |
Over the years some studies about this have been done, not by the FBI. Dr. Frank R. Ervin of Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital and Lawrence Razavi of Stanford Medical School did a study and published their results at the 136th meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston in 1970. Two articles that summarize this are "Anatomy of Violence", Newsweek January 12, 1970 and "Study made of sex case fingerprints", by Gordon Slovut in the Minneapolis Star. I'm not sure how indepth their study was, but it is interesting to think about. | ||
| Marjorie Veazey |
For a science class, I am looking for resources to investigate whether or not the FBI has established any correlations between fingerprint types and violent criminals. |
