CLEVER COPS OF THE WEEK: FINGERPRINTS FROM PHOTOS
by Hazed
A drug gang in South Wales in the UK has been convicted thanks to a pioneering technique that lifted fingerprints from a WhatsApp photo.
When a man was arrested recently after a tip-off about drugs being sold from a house in Bridgend, his phone was found to contain an image of a man holding ecstasy tables in his hand. They thought the picture was sent to the man by the drug dealer, showing off his wares.
The police sent the photo to their scientific support unit, who were able to scan the image into their system.
However, the photo just showed parts of the middle and bottom of a finger, whereas fingerprint records only keep the top part. So the image didn’t match up to anything in the national databases. But police had a pretty good idea who the dealer was, so they were able to match the small areas shown in the photo with his hands and prove he was the culprit.
Ingenious!
