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| - In fictionland, you can get a fingerprint off of anything, including human skin. Most of the time, you'll get a complete print suitable for analysis. If you get a partial, odds are that it's still good enough for analysis. You can also get a sample good enough for identification by fingerprinting a heavily decomposed corpse. Everyone in the world has their fingerprints on file, so an AFIS search is always going to come back with something (but then, it is a Magical Database). No one even takes the precaution of wearing gloves, which is a common practice among criminals, although it is sometimes possible to leave a fingerprint impression through thin gloves. The AFIS match is always conclusive.
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| abstract
| - In fictionland, you can get a fingerprint off of anything, including human skin. Most of the time, you'll get a complete print suitable for analysis. If you get a partial, odds are that it's still good enough for analysis. You can also get a sample good enough for identification by fingerprinting a heavily decomposed corpse. Everyone in the world has their fingerprints on file, so an AFIS search is always going to come back with something (but then, it is a Magical Database). No one even takes the precaution of wearing gloves, which is a common practice among criminals, although it is sometimes possible to leave a fingerprint impression through thin gloves. The AFIS match is always conclusive. In the real world, an examiner looks at a list of possible matches generated from the database -- computer pattern matching is much more basic and can contain lots of false positives. Also, mistakes are possible, albeit rare. In 2005, three experienced FBI examiners mis-identified Brandon Mayfield as a suspect in the Madrid Bombings. A fourth expert hired by the court went along with the results. The mistake later came to light when the Spanish authorities disagreed with the result. Fingerprinting in the real world is not quite so easy, but there are one or two places where the shows catch a break. CSI benefits from being set in Las Vegas, where the largest employers (the casinos) require employees to register with the gaming commission. The use of superglue fumes to process latent fingerprints is, surprisingly, quite real. While not quite so miraculous as it appears on TV, it certainly must have seemed that way when it was first discovered. Fingerprinting also tends to be so common in fiction that lack of fingerprints is taken as evidence of someone interfering with evidence. No one ever lacks fingerprints unless they're a criminal, everyone has a full set of prints, no one gets one burnt off by accident. DNA works the same way as fingerprints. Anything the perp has licked, touched, or sweat on can incriminate them. In real life, suitable DNA for comparison is harder to get, comparisons takes days, not minutes, and the percentage of people listed in CODIS is very small indeed. Until the past few years, DNA comparisons were impossible without a very large sample, and the technology to compare small samples is still of limited availability. On the other hand, if it's not the kind of show where science saves the day, the best crime scene team in the world isn't going to find a single print. Columbo, in 35 years, only had three cases broken by fingerprints. (In one, it was prints on the insides of gloves. One where the gun used was wiped of prints but not the bullets. In another, the bad guy was actually caught because Columbo's prints were on the evidence. Yeah, it's a long story.) The trope name comes from an exchange on CSI, possibly the worst offender. A detective asks Warrick if he can pull a print from some object, and he exaggerates, "I can pull a fingerprint off the air." Examples of Fingerprinting Air include:
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