For what types of crimes do police use fingerprints?

Fingerprints can be used in any type of crime. In general its significantly cheaper to use powders at a crime scene to look for prints, pay examiners like myself to analyze and compare them than it is to collect DNA and perform that testing. read more

Fingerprints can be used in any type of crime. In general its significantly cheaper to use powders at a crime scene to look for prints, pay examiners like myself to analyze and compare them than it is to collect DNA and perform that testing. Everything from stolen property to homicide. read more

Fingerprints are used to solve crimes by comparing them to other collected fingerprints. This used to be done manually and was a slow, tedious process, and was only really effective when you could compare the latent fingerprint to a known suspect's fingerprints. read more

Even identical twins have different fingerprints. Police officers use fingerprints to identify defendants by comparing prints found at a crime scene with prints already in police files. (Today, the FBI has a collection of prints that numbers in the millions.) People's fingerprints can be on file for a variety of reasons. read more