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The Devil Made’em Do It

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KPLC 7 News, Lake Charles, Louisiana
 

 

During August, KPLC 7 News of Lake Charles, Louisiana, posted a news item about a technology closely related to forensics: biometrics. Charles Caldarera, principal of Moss Bluff Elementary School, had sent a letter to parents about the planned installation of a biometric system. To reduce errors in lunch accounting and accelerate the cafeteria line, the school would install a Fujitsu PalmSecure™ biometric authentication system, which enables positive identification using a scanner that reads the unique patterns of blood vessels in a human palm. 

“With an elementary school, they all come through line, and most of them eat here,”
 Caldarera explained to KPLC. “It would make us more efficient and more accurate. We’ve had parents complain in the past, because they felt like their children weren’t eating, that we assigned them a charge for the day, and they might have been right.”

This sounds reasonable. About 1,000 students attend the school. Yet some parents objected to the biometric system. Vehemently.

“As a Christian, I’ve read the Bible,” said one parent, “you know, go to church and stuff. I know where it’s going to end up coming to, the mark of the beast. I’m not going to let my kids have that.”

The basis for the objection is elusive, since the scanner would only detect something that was already there. Perhaps, a monstrous surprise awaits school personnel when they begin to scan the little devils.

As Mike Elgan notes in his Computerworld article, “Are biometric ID tools evil?” many oppose biometric identification systems. However, the objections are usually based on privacy concerns.

Face(book)ing the Music

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social mediaIn the previous posting, I mentioned that law enforcement agencies use social media in criminal investigations. Before turning back to more traditional forms of forensic analysis, I wanted to highlight more information about social media uses.

The August 2012 issue of Government Security News magazine includes the article, “Social media play a ‘significant and growing’ role in law enforcement.” The article describes the results of LexisNexis® Risk Solutions’ recent survey of 1,200 federal, state, and local law enforcement professionals. About 80% of the respondents claimed to use various types of social media to assist criminal investigations. The most popular uses of social media include identification of people and locations, gathering evidence, and discovering criminal activity. The most widely-used platforms include Facebook and YouTube. Most of the respondents said that their use of social media platforms has helped to solve crimes more quickly. They also said that almost 90% of the time, courts have upheld search warrants that relied on information culled from social media to establish probable cause.

In her CNBC posting, “Busted! Police Turn to Social Media to Fight Crime,” Cadie Thompson offered the views of Haywood Talcove, CEO of LexisNexis® Government Solutions. Talcove said that law enforcement officials often use as evidence images, postings, tweets, and other social media content. This raises the question: Why would anyone publicize incriminating evidence? “Criminals have that same desire to share and to show-off,” Talcove said. “I don’t think they can resist using these tools.”

In films, TV shows, and books, fictional criminal investigators turn to social media for clues. Your fictional heroes might want to follow their lead.

Using Media to Warm Cold Cases

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 Cold case1

 

Evidence Technology Magazine recently posted an excerpt from Silvia Pettem’s book, Cold Case Research: Resources for Unidentified, Missing, and Cold Homicide Cases. Pettem describes how law enforcement agencies use media to generate leads on cold cases.

In one example, an unidentified body washed ashore on February 20, 1983 in Marin County, California. Although the body was decomposed, a pocket still held a keychain. The key fob advertised an auto sales company in Erie, Pennsylvania. The case was stored away until 2004 when Darrell Harris, an investigator with the Marin County Sheriff’s Office Coroner’s Division, contacted a newspaper reporter in Erie. The story, published in the Erie Times, provoked a response from a reader who said that he had a friend, Joseph Coogan, who had traveled to California in late 1982 or 1983 and then disappeared. Harris contacted every California agency with a beach-line jurisdiction in the area. He received an accidental drowning report from Monterey County about a man named Joseph Coogan, who had fallen from rocks on the coastline and had been swept out to sea. Further investigation confirmed that the John Doe was the body of Joseph Coogan.

Newspapers aren’t the only types of media used to awaken a cold case. Many law enforcement agencies post their cold cases on agency websites. For instance, the website of the City of San Antonio Police displays information about unsolved homicide cold cases with the aim of acquiring assistance from the public. The Cold Case Center™ website has links to information about cold cases from law enforcement agencies, as well as criminal justice and victim’s rights associations.

Law enforcement personnel also use social media to further an investigation. A search of Facebook and similar websites can uncover a subject’s friends, where they may be found, and photos of persons of interest. Investigators have created Facebook accounts for fictional people and then “friended” a person to access his or her wall. Why bother? Well, some people unintentionally help police by using their wall to brag about crimes that they have committed.