OT? Forensic Files

There are a few shows like that and it is amazing how they track down and find things. Bugs on the radiator of a rental car, a hair found on the chassis of a truck

Other hints: Pay cash, don't take your cell phone, don't keep receipts for shovels and rope, avoid toll roads.

No matter where you go, you will be on a camera along the way too.

A lot of "forensics" is bullshit that people have tricked juries into believing is true.

Bullshit.

I like the TV criminals in who think pulling VHS tape from its cassette erases it like exposing film from a camera.

As a kid I remember finding the occasional 8-track tape at the side of a road with about a hundred feet of tape unspooled and tangled in the weeds. I'd carefully gather it up, take it home, clean off the dirt and wind it all back up. The tapes worked quite well in their second life. I got The Grateful Dead and Deep Purple that way, among others.

Smoke on the Water

Tape is pretty forgiving if you can live with a little burp now and then. An 8 track moved 3.75" a second so a crease in the tape was just a momentary pop. The 8 track moved tape twice as fast as a cassette so there was the potential for better sound but most car systems in those days were not going to exploit it. They sounded better on a home system. The biggest problem with 8 track and cassettes was the crummy quality of the media itself. All 8 track cassettes were not created equal and some studios bought the cheapest crap they could find. What happens when it fails? You buy another one. Jimmy Buffett cassettes were the worst. I have had them fail in a week. I was really happy when MP3s came along and I could get rid of those little bits of plastic. I was happy stealing his songs too. I had already bought most of them several times. He had a bad habit of loading up his "new" album with the same old songs as filler.

Actually, it was Burn. I already had Machine Head.

On Sat, 29 Aug 2020 22:13:48 -0400, snipped-for-privacy@aol.com posted for all of us to digest...

Finger prints and ballistics are two others that are more art than science.

More utterly mindless silly stuff.

It is clear you don't understand how they work.

I do actually with both those. Fingerprints and ballistics have nothing to do with art. DNA in spades.

Fingerprints in particular is art. That is why you can have "experts" disagreeing on how many points match. Ballistics (bullet striation match) is even more suspect because those marks change as a gun ages. If you have bullets shot out of a particular gun in fairly quick succession it might be somewhat valid but if you are comparing bullets fired from a gun when it was brand new compared to when it has been fired a few thousand times, you are not getting much of a match. You have a better chance of matching the bullet to the next gun coming off the line ... unless you don't believe in "tool mark" forensics.

Bullshit it is when the fingerprints match.

More mindless silly stuff.

But not by enough to matter.

F*ck all guns used in crimes are used that much.

Bullshit even with those.

Even sillier than you usually manage and that’s saying something.

On Mon, 31 Aug 2020 19:40:15 -0400, snipped-for-privacy@aol.com posted for all of us to digest...

With AFIS the fingerprints are getting more reliable as to who to investigate.

Ballistics are sketchy and one needs to compare a known and suspected. Outside influences will affect results.

I suspect as computers get more involved and more fingerprints get entered into databases the more we will find matches between different people up to the quality of the print itself. When I was getting my CCW the people taking the prints admitted a very high percentage of cards submitted are of such poor quality that they are just a formality, not really useful for anything. Then when you consider a lifted print from a crime scene is going to be a smudged partial print from a couple of fingers, you see the problem. They are most useful when you have a suspect and a print from the scene that the cops claim, match and they start pressing for a confession. The same is true of ballistics. Virtually if not every state that has tried collecting ballistics and fired cases from new guns being sold, has never used them to solve a crime. Maryland is a prime example. The last I heard is they had collected over 300,000 fires cases and it was zero.

Yes, but it is still trivial to have a human compare the fingerprints that are claimed to be a match and check that they really are a match when it’s a full fingerprint or close to a full fingerprint.

No art involved in that case.

Just because some fool claims something...

That’s bullshit on the smudged claim.

That’s not art either.

Bullshit it is.

But plenty have found that a gun found in the possession of a criminal does match the bullet found at the crime scene.

All that shows is that most of the guns used in criminal activity havent had bullets from them included in that database when they were new. Unsurprising given how long the guns are still usable for.

And easy to have a human compare the prints when the system offers one as a match.