Crime Scene Forensics--Classifying and Making Use of Shoeprints

"Maybe you remember the Russian fable Cinderella. If the shoe fits, wear it."-Chekhov, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

Cinderella may have been the only beautiful woman at the ball wearing tiny glass slippers, but very few perpetrators wear shoes that are very easily identifiable. Most shoes are produced in large quantities and in a wide assortment of shapes and sizes to cater to different sexes and age groups. This makes matching a perpetrator to a shoeprint very challenging. For starters, crime scene investigators (CSI's) begin by identifying the size and manufacturer of a shoe prior to dealing with the characteristics that make the track unique. These characteristics include debris left behind, wear patterns, and damage. Shoeprints are very important to CSI's that the FBI works with shoe manufacturers to compile a database of sole patterns.

Your shoes travel across a wide variety of surfaces daily. These surfaces include hardwood, carpet, soft soil, tile, and rain-soaked or snow-covered sidewalks, for instance. As you walk, the soles of your shoes are scraped, and they pick up dirt, grease, oil, debris, and moisture. Much of this material then is deposited on other surfaces, leaving behind your unique shoeprints.

Shoeprints fall into three different classifications:

• Patent
  
  Patent is a term that means visible. These kinds of prints result from tracking through a medium like dirt, blood, or paint, and leaving some of it behind as you walk.


• Plastic
  
  Walking through mud, snow, or other soft malleable mediums leaves plastic, or three-dimensional, tracks.


• Latent
  
  Latent is the antithesis of patent and refers to shoeprints that are invisible to the naked eye. These shoeprints result when you transfer a thin layer of accumulated yet invisible oils and grime from the soles of your shoes to a hard medium, such as glass, pieces of newspaper, cardboard, or polished tile, wooden, or concrete floors.

The next time you watch the CSI TV shows, you will have a better understanding of what the CSI's talk about when they encounter footprints found at a crime scene.

Fabiola Castillo is an online marketer for the website NinjaCOPS.com. This virtual store specializes in personal defense products where you can buy the best pepper spray, kubaton keychains, hidden video spy surveillance cameras, cheap stun guns, nunchaku training videos, telescopic steel batons, and many other home security products.