Nabbed! (page 2 of 2)

Computers With a Badge

Sharp focus on fingerprints. Police in Kirkland, Washington, were frustrated. They had a suspect in the murder of a 27-year-old Bible-studies student: her neighbor, Eric H. Hayden. They also had a bed sheet with a bloody hand print. But the pattern on the fabric caused the fingerprints and palm prints to be unclear, making it impossible to match them to Hayden's hand. Enter Erik Berg, a forensic field supervisor with the police department in nearby Tacoma. Berg took digital photos of the prints and, using a computer program, filtered out the background "noise," producing clear prints that helped convict Hayden, who is now serving 26 years in prison.

Looking for fingerprints remains an essential part of any crime-scene investigation. However, criminals rarely leave behind pristine impressions. Berg's innovative technique, which is now available to police departments in the form of software called More Hits, enables police to read smudged or partial prints. "It's like using the fine tuner on your television," says David Witzke, vice president of PC Pros, the Washington State-based company that sells More Hits.

You can run ... Kansas City police were left scratching their heads when they investigated the murder of a 39-year-old woman in 2000: The killer had removed and hidden the victim's clothes and other incriminating evidence. But investigators were able to scrape tiny bits of DNA from under the woman's fingernails; apparently she had put up a fight and scratched her assailant. The genetic information was plugged into an FBI-run database known as CODIS (Combined DNA Index System). This network lets federal, state and local crime labs exchange and compare DNA electronically. The Kansas City cops hit pay dirt: The DNA matched that of a paroled rapist from Arkansas named Wayne DuMond. Last January, DuMond was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

"And after the weather, the crime forecast." Imagine understaffed police forces being able to predict the best areas to deploy their officers. Using computers, scientists at the Heinz School at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh tracked minor and major crimes for more than a decade in two cities -- Rochester, New York, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

After running extensive statistical analyses, the scientists discovered, for example, that an uptick in minor crimes such as vandalism usually precedes, by about a month, more serious property crimes such as burglary and larceny.

When the researchers road-tested their program in Rochester and Pittsburgh, they were able to predict crimes with at least 80 percent accuracy. What's more, they could narrow down where the crime would take place to an area as small as an individual police beat -- about one square mile. By the end of this year, the researchers hope to begin distributing the software to precincts across the country.

Reach out and bust someone. While criminals often seem to strike in a random fashion, statistical analysis of crime locations can disclose patterns. That's useful when police are hunting for serial criminals, says Texas State University criminologist Kim Rossmo, who created a concept called geographic profiling. "If we can decode those patterns, we can use the information to focus the investigation," says Rossmo, a former cop.

Rossmo notes that criminals tend to do their dirty deeds close to home -- but not too close. He has developed software that analyzes an area where linked crimes have occurred, then isolates a tiny section where the crook most likely lives. That allows police to focus on specific suspects. In one case, police in Midland, Ontario, used geographic profiling to nab a prolific burglar. The system nearly drew a circle around the suspect's home.

Space-Age Crime Solving
Crime lab in a box. DNA testing is touted as the cutting edge of forensic science, but the high-tech workhorse of most crime labs has long been the gas chromatographer-mass spectrometer (GC-MS). These bulky instruments identify organic compounds by vaporizing them and analyzing the resulting gas molecules. But transporting substances -- such as chemical weapons, residue from explosives and fire accelerants, and drugs -- to crime labs takes time and can be dangerous.

"You'd have a huge advantage if you could have this laboratory instrument in the field," says analytical scientist Peter Nunes, of the Forensic Science Center at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is part of the U.S. Department of Energy.

So Nunes and colleagues shrank a standard GC-MS -- which weighs between 250 and 300 pounds -- down to 75 pounds, or about the size of a small ice chest. This portable GC-MS is already on the market and is in limited use by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.

Crime rates have fallen in the United States over the last decade, and there's some evidence that innovations in technology have encouraged that trend. Imagine the dampening effect that better crime detection -- not to mention prediction -- will have on future criminals. Holmes had Watson: Isn't it comforting to know that tomorrow's cops will have science by their side?

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