So I’ve been watching COPS (the TV show):
After stopping a suspect, the policeman asks the guy if he’s been arrested before, or if he is on parole. And often, the suspect says “yes”.
DUH!—that doesn’t seem like a good way to convince the cop that you are a good citizen and maybe he could let you go with a warning and not search the car.
And then it occured to me–why don’t criminals deny their past, and claim to be somebody else? If you already have a record , why not create a fake ID for yourself, and try to avoid the additional penalties for being a repeat offender?
How do the police identify a criminal who they arrest on the street?Say a junkie/street thug/crack dealer–the kind of person who doesnt have a bank account of any kind, and doesnt carry ID or credit cards in his wallet.He may have some verifiable data, like a permanent home address, and driver’s license–but why admit that to the police, if you know it will only get you a stiffer penalty? Why not just claim to be a homeless guy name John Smith, who doesnt remember his social security number, and has never been arrested before?
(Obviously, I am totally naive here—I’ve had virtually no contact with the police or courts in my life.I suppose a database of computerized fingerprints can be searched , but that’s probably a new technology.What did the police do 5 or 10 years ago, before the internet?)
People lie about their identity to the police all the time, and I mean all the time. Somewhere in America at this very moment somebody is giving their cousin’s name to a police officer. Generally the person is not trying to avoid a stiffer penalty for being a repeat offender. That wouldn’t just involve deceiving one police officer on a routine stop; that would mean deceiving the entire justice system. This is the proverbial attempt at fooling all the people all the time. Sucessfully creating an entirely new identity for yourself is very difficult work, and the problems it would cause far outweighs the benefits when viewed up against simply staying out of trouble, or at least not getting caught again.
Usually people lie about their identity for a much more mundane reason: they have a warrant out for something or other and don’t want the officer to take them to jail. The problem is most people seem to be terrible liars in this regard. Criminal masterminds (or even just the lucky) may get away with it occassionally, but most of the time the false identity is hastily assembled on the spot and it shows:
“What’s your name, sir?”
“Uhhhh…Mark. Mike. Mike Watson.”
“What’s your date of birth, Mr. Watson?”
“I don’t know.”
“What did you say your first name was again?”
“Um… John. John Waltson.”
That’s an exaggeration, but you’d be surprised how close to the truth it gets sometimes. Usually some aspect of the person’s identity or story doesn’t check out when the police run the ID, the person’s explanation is even worse and makes the officer more suspicious, and they eventually get arrested for failure to ID.
I will point out that according to a graduate student I knew at my illustrious alma mater, NC Central University, persons giving false names or adress information to an arresting officer were not eligible for bail. This would have been Durham, NC, USA, circa 1999.
Not being eligible for bail could make a trivial arrest over something petty into a rather serious problem… just the time lost waiting for your day in court, over something that would wind up being a $50 fine, could end your job, etc etc etc
People lie about their names all of the time. I’m not sure why, because it doesn’t seem to do any good unless the person is being charged with a minor violation of the law and also has ID in the fake name. A relatively minor offense like not paying the fare on the subway would normally result in a desk appearance ticket, but if the person doesn’t have ID, it’s off to be fingerprinted first. At which time the prior record and any warrants will come up. Oh, and under some circumstances, the person will also be charged with “false personation”.
In Ohio lying about your name to a policeman who is in the course of his official capacity can be considered the separate misdemeanor crime of obstruction of official business, so all lying about one’s name accomplishes is adding another charge to person’s rap sheet.
If you are a “junkie/street thug/crack dealer” and not carrying any ID, you will not be released from jail until you are positively identified – usually through fingerprints.
You’d be suprised how fast a fingerprint expert can identify someone. I had this kid who would not give his name at all. He just didn’t feel like talking. Unlike the regular county jail, the Juvenile Detention Center does NOT accept criminals until they are identified. So we were stuck with this guy until we found his name.
All it took was a short drive downtown. One of the fingerprint guys took the kid’s prints and found his name in under five minutes. And this is not using some high-tech computer AFIS system or anything!! Even the computer couldn’t do it this fast, if at all.
The guy took one look at the prints, found some loop or swirl that stuck out to him, and went straight to the catalog drawer. He grabbed a couple dozen cards and flipped through them fast as hell! And like I said, in under five minutes he had the kid’s name!! Keep in mind he was working with records on hundreds of thousands of prints! I’m still impressed.
For it to work like that, the criminal has to have been previously arrested in the county. But that is almost always the case. Even for minors.
Well… um yeah. Are you suggesting that matching fingerprints are not a vaild form of identification?? We need to get the word out!!! I’ll call INTERPOL, you inform the Federal Bureau of Prisons!!
:smack:Brilliant! I can’t believe nobody ever thought of that!:D(just kidding!)
Obviously, I am totally naive here—I’ve had virtually no contact with the police or courts in my life. Good!
That tactic can backfire. About 3 years ago we stopped & talked to a guy who was leaning against a fence at a construction site at 3a.m… It was just an F.I. stop, he really wasn’t doing anything illegal… until he gave us a false name. When we ran that name through dispatch it came back with a valid felony warrent for Homicide via Arson!:eek:
You could hear the turds hitting his Fruit of the Looms as we arrested him.
When he finally gave his real name we kept him under arrest…for obstructing!
Something like that happened to a friend of mine when we were teenagers. We were walking home from a keg party, drunk of course, and a pair of cops stopped us. They asked us our names and I gave them my real name while my friend (whose first name was Todd) gave them the fake name of ‘Todd Church’. They pulled their guns and made us lie on the ground while they cuffed us and said “Todd Church , we have a warrant for your arrest”. It seems Todd Church was wanted for a whole bunch of stuff, including some armed robberies.
After they got us downtown, and Todd finally convinced them that he WASN’T Todd Church, they charged him with underage drinking and public drunkeness while letting me off scott free since I was straight with them.
It’s hard to tell when people are kidding here on the SDMB, but several people, most notably Simon Cole, have been making exactly that assertion recently. The best article is a PDF here, and there are shorter ones here and here.
The gist of these is that fingerprinting has been sort of “grandfathered” into the court system as a science because “everybody knows” that it works, rather than being subjected to actual study. When real double-blind studies HAVE recently been done, the ability to “match” fingerprints to identities or even to each other has proven to be much, much lower than anyone expected.
Am I convinced? I don’t know – I’ve sure heard about enough cases where fingerprints have been the first evidence against a suspect, but investigation found more. On the other hand, I’m familiar enough with the concept of confirmation bias to realize that my “recollections” aren’t really compelling evidence. It seems to me that it’s only fair that such an important tool be tested thoroughly, and apparently that hasn’t happened yet, because of inertia and the legal implications of fingerprinting being discovered not to be a valid method of ID.
I’ve asked Cecil to pronounce judgement on the matter, but thus far…silence.
While there are some very skilled practitioners of fingerprint ID, the practice is not infallible by itself -or in combination with human eyes (e.g. this case and commentary) I get nervous when a fingerprint expert maginally finds an "expected: result like that. There is a hefty list of proven erroneous identifications and strong evidence that initial expert IDs are prone to “suggestibility”. (though of course humans can be remarkable at matching and recall)
I have had a longstanding interest in this, ever since a court case challenged the scientific standing of Fingerprint IDs (rightly I think) around the time I did my Boy Scout Fingerprint merit badge in the 70s. Needless to say, I’ve learn a lot more since, but more importantly, fingerprints have been found not to meet the Supreme Court’s Daubert Standard for scientific proof (set in Daubert v. Dow Pharmaceuticals, 1993) and Judge Louis Pollack, former dean of Yale and U/Penn Law schools. affirmed that failure to meet Daubert in 2002.
Don’t get me wrong: most evidence we consider strong is not nearly as reliable as a confirmed 10-point match. Eyewitnesses aren’t even close, and I doubt even confessions are – I’d say only the most rigorous DNA tests exceed it (having a background in molecular biology, I know that the simpler and older DNA tests may not) . It’s just that fingerprint IDs are not iron-clad – and most fingerprints that aren’t made under controlled circumstances don’t yield confirmable 10-point matches, which makes the whole principle shakier
Writing an updated lay article on this (I’m neither a lawyer nor a fingerprint expert) has been on my “To Do” list for too long. Maybe I’ll do it now that I’m on vacation. The facts are a bit unsettling, even for me – but I guess that’s because we all want absolutes, which is actually rather uncommon.
Yes, as others have pointed out. It looks like in the case you presented that someone went to a drawer containing a limited number of fingerprints of local criminals (compared to a huge national or international database) and made a match. That’s a subjective match, subject to human error. Just how close was it? Fingerprint experts don’t seem to agree on how many “points” of similarity constitute absolute indentity. Often prints left on a crime scene are partial, which reduces the possibility of a multi-point match and increases the possibility of a mistaken ID.
I just want to point out that I do not now, nor have I claimed to be Willis Green Bryant. He, on the other hand, once claimed to be me. The lady at the DMV was selling valid driver licenses, mine included.
I guess I was lucky Mr. Bryant was an idiot, and presented this nice, valid, fake ID while he was arrested climbing out of a house in Dunn, NC with a TV. Neither the house nor the TV belonged to Mr. Bryant.
Why do I call Mr. Bryant an idiot? Because he did not use the ID and a modest $100 deposit to engage in the much more lucrative crime of check and credit card fraud. (Bank ID laws were much more lax fifteen years ago.)
BTW, Musicat, while this was nowhere near a national sample, it probably contained at least a half a million or so cards. You probably know more about the system than I do. But apparantly different shapes on different fingers give the suspect a certain number Identifier. He found something that stuck out to him and went straight to a specific drawer. He said it would be a piece of cake when he first glanced at the kid’s prints. He tried to point out to me what feature “stood out” but it all looked the same to me. The guy had a pretty cocky attitude and jokingly asked the kid to print his name on the fingerprint card before he even started.
Maybe the ID expert only finds 1 name in every 10 suspects. Maybe it usually takes an hour or so. That’s all possible. But what he did that specific night was, and still is, pretty impressive.
There are certain patterns that are common and some that are not. He probably recognized an odd one that few fingers have and only a fingerprint examiner could love. A scar would work, too.
