The Forensic Science Education Blog

Established by the United States Congress in 2009, March is National Criminal Justice Month, and its purpose is to promote societal awareness around the causes and consequences of crime, as well as strategies for preventing and responding to crime.

For well over a century, fingerprints have been at the cornerstone of forensic investigations in America. The resilience of this method of identification comes down to a powerful tenet that’s yet to be disproven: no two sets of fingerprints are the same.

As computers, smartphones, and networks have become more sophisticated, so have the various types of cyberattacks that they face. And an increasing reliance on connected systems means that a disruption in service can have an enormous real-world impact.

Cognitive science has already been integrated with several other high-risk fields such as medicine, air traffic control, and nuclear power. But a series of failures within the forensic community—many of which came into view with the advent of DNA profiling—have now demonstrated the need for cognitive research into forensic practices, too.

As a society, we wave off these low conviction rates as cold cases, but often, the victim’s rape kit was never tested in the first place. According to the Joyful Heart Foundation’s “End the Backlog” team, there is a backlog of untested rape kits in the hundreds of thousands that are sitting in police and crime lab storage facilities across the country.

Today, deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs), which are trained on millions of face images from thousands of people, can recognize faces in highly-variable, low-quality images. But modern facial forensics won’t become an equitable and acceptable practice until the tech, and the people behind the tech, acknowledge their shortcomings head-on.

The hardware and skills of the digital forensics discipline are constantly evolving, requiring vigilant upkeep. As a result, many public sector laboratories are overburdened, and it’s creating a serious backlog. The private sector may have the answer.

Embezzlement isn’t a perfect crime, but it can easily go unnoticed for long stretches, so to tackle embezzlement and bring its perpetrators to justice, forensic professionals need a skillset that blends expertise in IT, accounting, and investigations.

According to the US Department of Justice, one in every ten bankruptcy filings includes some element of fraud. While it directly affects businesses and financial institutions who act as creditors, it also has negative indirect effects on the consumer, as creditors increase their fees on credit cards and loans to compensate for losses to bankruptcy fraud.

The criminal justice system has systemic flaws that disproportionately punish the poor and reward the rich. A bevy of factors play into this disparity, but mainly manifest themselves in discrepancies in bail, discrepancies in sentencing, and discrepancies in incarceration.

In 2009, President Obama called cybersecurity one of the most important challenges facing the nation. Ten years later, it’s a clear and present danger. Major cyber attacks have hit government offices in Atlanta, Baltimore, and New Orleans.

In a hypothetical Dante’s Inferno scenario where all of the world’s white collar criminals were arranged in a descending order of wickedness, healthcare fraudsters would sit somewhere between hell’s eighth and ninth concentric rings.

There’s no algorithm for justice, and thus there’s still a strong need for investigators to perform their due diligence and apply many of the same tactics used to bring down Al Capone: comparing records, subpoenaing documents, interviewing possible witnesses, and following the money.

There are various online master’s programs available in criminal justice which do not require GRE scores for admission. The Graduate Record Examination is a computerized test that many graduate schools in the US require students to take. The aim of the exam is to measure students’ verbal, critical thinking, and writing skills.

Identity theft doesn’t have a typical crime scene: there is no blood, and there are no fingerprints, but there are still forensic traces if an investigator knows where to look.