New Forensics Technique to Recognize Dust on Offenders Can Result in Prosecution
Researchers took the first steps in developing a brand-new method of identifying the movements of lawbreakers using chemical analysis of dirt and dust discovered on equipment, clothing, and cars. The tracking system enables police or security services to match soil remnants found on personal items to local soil samples to either implicate or rule out presence at a crime scene. The work is presented as a Keynote Lecture at the Goldschmidt Geochemistry Seminar after a recent publication.
Dr. Patrice de Caritat, Principal Research Study Scientist at Geoscience Australia, Australia’s public sector geoscience organization, said:
“We have done the very first trials to see if geochemical evaluation might pinpoint a search area. We took a 260 km2 area of North Canberra, separated it into cells (squares) of 1 kilometer x 1 kilometer, and sampled the soil in each cell. We were then provided three samples from within the study area and asked to determine which grid cells they came from. This was a ‘blind’ experiment. To put it simply, we did not know the origin of the samples until the experiment ended. For reference, Manhattan Island is around 60 km2, to make sure that reveals that we considered a quite big area.”
Using these methods, they were able to remove 60% of the area under examination.
Dr. de Caritat said, “Much of forensics has to do with elimination, so being able to eliminate 60% of an area is a significant contribution toward efficiently finding a sample. You can minimize the time, risk, and also investment of the open investigation. The more criteria we take a look at, a lot more accurate the system is. We have reached 90% detection sometimes, although we believe that would certainly include too many elements for real-world criminal offense detection.”
The team used a series of analytical instrumentation– Fourier Transform InfraRed Spectroscopy, X-Ray Fluorescence, Magnetic Susceptibility, and Mass Spectrometry – to compare the three blind examples to the previously collected samples.
Dr. de Caritat, who is additionally Adjunct Professor at the National Centre for Forensic Studies at the University of Canberra, claimed:
“This shows that our systems work well and that we have a prospective brand-new tool for criminal and intelligence examinations. It is the following stage that is possibly most fascinating. The majority of developed countries have existing soil databases, * used for activities such as mineral exploration or land use decision assistance. We are connecting our methods to these databases to see if we can find samples from the database details instead of accumulating examples, particularly for each investigation.
Standard soil analysis has already been used in Australia to determine and prosecute lawbreakers. For instance, soil analysis was used to recognize the activities of a man that sexually assaulted a young girl in Adelaide. There are numerous such examples. We now wish to improve this.”
Dr de Caritat worked with the Australian Federal Police in 2017-18, where he helped them establish their ability to evaluate soils for forensic location. He said:
” Geoscience Australia is currently partnering with the Australian Federal Police, the University of Adelaide, Flinders University, as well as the University of Canberra on a Defence Department task to incorporate environmental DNA, for example, local plants, and X-Ray Diffraction mineralogy right into the soil and dust area system.”
Professor Jennifer McKinley (Queen’s University, Belfast) commented, ‘The development in Dr de Caritat’s work incorporates sound compositional data analysis of the multivariate geochemical information into forensic geoscience also applies this in an ingenious way to forensic soil provenance.’
Originally published on Scitechdaily.com. Read the original article.
References:
“Forensic soil provenancing in an urban/suburban setting: A sequential multivariate approach” by Patrice de Caritat PhD, Brenda Woods PhD, Timothy Simpson BSc (Hons), Christopher Nichols BAppSc (Hons), Lissy Hoogenboom BSc, Adriana Ilheo GradCert, Michael G. Aberle BAppSc (Hons) and Jurian Hoogewerff PhD, 6 May 2021, Journal of Forensic Sciences.
DOI: 10.1111/1556-4029.14727
“Predictive Soil Provenancing (PSP): An Innovative Forensic Soil Provenance Analysis Tool” by Patrice de Caritat Ph.D., Timothy Simpson B.Sc. (Hons) and Brenda Woods Ph.D., 16 April 2019, Journal of Forensic Sciences.
DOI:10.1111/1556-4029.14060
