Ground-breaking interrogation of hand anatomy to help identify child abusers

Ground-breaking interrogation of hand anatomy to help identify child abusers

Lancaster University is conducting research on what makes a person’s hands unique to create the world’s first searchable database of human hand anatomy.  

Feb 13, 2019


The study will build on successful prosecutions that have relied on identifying individuals from images of their hands in child abuse cases.
 
The research programme, H-unique, will last for five years and has been funded by €2.5 million from the European Research Council.
 
It will combine ‘hard biometrics’, such as fingerprints, with ‘soft biometrics’, including superficial vein pattern, skin crease pattern and tattoos. 

This will culminate in the first multimodal automated interrogation of visible hand anatomy, through analysis and interpretation of human variation via images. 

Professor Dame Sue Black, who is pioneering the project, said: “The hand retains and displays many anatomical differences due to our genetics, development, environment or even accidents so each person’s hands are different. Now for the first time, researchers will analyse all the factors that make a hand truly unique so we can understand and use them reliably as evidence to identify individuals.”

Researchers will collect images from over 5,000 participants to construct an active, open-source dataset.  
This will allow algorithms to be designed that address the effects of variable image conditions on data extraction, which will allow people in the future to search across large numbers of stored images of variable quality. 

Lancaster University said that this will be “a major novel breakthrough in the study of anatomical variation”. 
Professor Black added: “A significant step change is required in the science to both reliably and repeatedly extract and compare anatomical information from large numbers of images especially when the hand is not in a standard position or when either the resolution or lighting in the image is not ideal.”

https://www.policeprofessional.com/news/ground-breaking-interrogation-of-hand-anatomy-to-help-identify-child-abusers/

This has been used before in child abuse cases and had some success.

There is also a case in which an Ear print was used successfully, recovered from a glass window he had leant against.

To catch a paedophile, you only need to look at their hands

When a paedophile or rapist films their crime, professor Sue Black can track them down using nothing more than the veins, scars and other markings on their hands

One day in 2006, Sue Black, a professor at the University of Dundee's department of Anatomy and Forensic Anthropology, received a phone call from a man called Nick Marsh. He was a forensic photographer who had worked with Black 17 years earlier as part of a team sent by the Foreign Office to examine the bodies of victims of war crimes in Kosovo. Marsh knew that Black had a talent for identifying people from scraps of flesh and bone. Now he had evidence of a different kind and wondered if she could help.

The piece of evidence was an eight-second-long digital video clip. Marsh had been working on a case involving a teenage girl who had alleged that her father had been coming into her bedroom at night to molest her. When her mother refused to believe her, the girl left her webcam running all night, pointed at her bed. The camera captured a person's hand and forearm touching her. Her father denied that he was the person in the video. "It was one of the spookiest and scariest things that I have ever seen," explains Black. "A real sort of horror movie."

Marsh asked Black if there was a way to identify the perpetrator. She didn't have clue. "I'd never done anything like that before. I'd never identified anyone using a hand," she says. But after studying the footage, Black noticed something that had escaped her before: the veins on the back of the man's hand were visible. In the dark, the camera had reverted to infrared mode, and in those conditions the deoxygenated blood in veins shows up as black lines. Black, an expert in anatomy, knew that hand-vein patterns are unique from person to person, even in identical twins. She asked the police to take photographs of the father's hand and forearm. The vein patterns matched.

Black appeared in court as an expert witness for the prosecution, presenting her vein-pattern analysis. It was the first time in British legal history that evidence of this kind was presented in court proceedings. When she was introduced, the judge had to stop the trial for 90 minutes to ask her to explain the principles behind her analysis. Black explained her rationale, but conceded that she didn't have statistics showing the likelihood of the hands matching. "That research had never been done. I could say no more than everything matched, and we couldn't say it definitely wasn't him," she says.

Still, it was strong evidence and the prosecuting barrister expected the father to be found guilty. However, he was acquitted.

"I asked the barrister if there was something we had done wrong or something in the science that I had not been able to convey," Black recalls. "She said, 'No, there was no problem with the science. The jury had just not believed the girl. They thought she didn't seem upset enough.'"Black was dumbfounded.

Shortly after the trial of the girl's father, the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) asked Black if she could help with an ongoing police investigation called Operation Ore. It was a long-running investigation of more than 7,000 British people suspected of downloading indecent images, after the FBI had found their details on the database of a child-porn distributor in Texas.

The operation became the UK's largest-ever computer crime investigation, involving the arrest of more than 3,700 people, including several public figures such as The Who guitarist Pete Townshend and The Thick of It actor and writer Chris Langham.

Black was again asked if she could identify people in the images. "Operation Ore was the first time I realised these kind of cases could have such a volume," she says. "I was naive. I thought it was all about isolated people in isolated cases." According to Black, about a million images of child abuse are uploaded to the dark web every day. When police seize mobile phones and find indecent images, they discover, on average, about 100,000 individual images. "It is a huge problem, and the police can't get near looking at them all, nor arresting their way out of it," Black says.

In the end, she worked only briefly as a consultant on Operation Ore, which soon became mired in controversy when journalists revealed flaws in police methods.

Nevertheless, it was a turning point for Black. During Operation Ore, she became fully aware of a problem that she didn't realise existed and that she might be the person who could do something about it.

But in the months after the trial, it occurred to her that she might have stumbled across a new idea. Marsh had mentioned that the police were seeing an ever-increasing number of indecent images and videos of children. Abusers often appeared themselves: "Sexual abuse of children is often about power, and the touching is a part of that," says Black. "When a perpetrator views an image of themselves abusing a child, they are reliving the enactment. If there's a part of them present in the image, it gives them an extra feeling of involvement."

The problem was that, in most cases, the only visible parts of the abusers' bodies were their hands and genitalia. Previously it had been widely assumed that such evidence was not enough to incriminate someone. But Black was unconvinced. "There was a research route that had never been fully explored," she says. "I had been involved in crimes where the victim was dead but these cases had live victims and perpetrators. I thought there might be something we could extract from those images and use in a meaningful way. I thought, 'We should be researching it.'"

Sitting in her 70s office with its high windows to let in light, Black looks very much the academic in a cardigan, with her hair plaited. Her manner is no-nonsense but affable.

Black grew up the youngest of two daughters in a blue-collar Inverness household, and was the first of her family to attend university - she studied biology then human anatomy at Aberdeen. She began her career teaching at St Thomas' Hospital in London. Stints of body-identification work for the police, then the Foreign Office, led to her working in Kosovo, for which she was awarded an OBE in 2001. She has since worked in conflict zones in countries such as Iraq, and in Thailand after the 2004 tsunami.

In 2003, Black took over the University of Dundee's Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification and began developing the links between anatomy and forensic science. In 2016, in recognition of her services to forensic anthropology, she was made a Dame.

The teams that work on forensic cases are, Black says, "very close knit. At the end [of a case] we will sit and talk it through. Counselling is always available, though we haven't needed it yet. We are very tuned in to each other, and if someone is uncomfortable we deal with it there and then. When a team is exposed to this sort of thing, which is as bad as it gets, each of you has to know that each member is not suffering themselves."

After Operation Ore, Black realised that hand analysis would be taken seriously only if it had a genuinely scientific foundation, rather than being based on ad hoc comparisons. It was fine to show the vein patterns of an abuser and the accused matched, but if the accused contended that many people had matching veins, Black wouldn't be able to back up her argument with any scientifically validated evidence. In other words, she would need a substantial database of hundreds of people, compiled with a minuscule budget.

In April 2007, Black's department won a contract to teach more than 550 police officers, coroners and legal officials about disaster-victim identification. Black asked attendees to have photos taken of their hands, forearms, feet and legs. Most agreed.

More recently, she helped a mother's fight to prove what had happened to her son's body. She carried out an exhumation at his burial plot in Edinburgh, and confirmed that no humans reminds were inside the coffin.

By 2008, she'd published a study confirming the validity of vein-pattern analysis. Shortly after, she was asked to help in another case. The defendants were eight men belonging to Scotland's largest-known paedophile network. For years, they'd colluded to rape and sexually abuse children, and shared at least 125,000 images of the abuse. The details were so harrowing that during the hearing, the public and media were barred from seeing the images, and counsellors were made available. At one point, the jury heard that one of the accused had circulated a request for "porn with young Down's syndrome or learning-difficulty kids".

Many images featured men abusing the children of friends. A key photo - later known as "the Hogmanay image" - showed one of the two ringleaders, Neil Strachan, 41, attempting to rape an 18-month-old boy whom he was babysitting on New Year's Eve in 2005. The only parts of Strachan's body visible were his penis and left hand. It was this image that Black analysed.

She was aided by a mistake on Strachan's part. His defence team ordered that photographs be taken of his thighs, their intention presumably to show that body parts could not be used to identify someone. However, when the photographer was taking the picture, he asked his subject to hold the photographic scale, which, says Black, "gave us a beautiful view of the accused's thumbs".

Black compared the left thumb in the picture with the Hogmanay image and found matching details, including an unusually shaped lunule, the white area at the base of the nail. "This time, I was able to go back to my database and put statistics to the data." In October 2009, Strachan was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 16 years, cut on appeal to nine years.

Hands can be used to verify a person's identity in two ways. First, they pick up marks and injuries - more than 20 per cent of people attending A&E in the UK have hand injuries. Second, it has in-built morphological features which are unique to the individual - fingertip whorls, palm prints and vein patterns. When a body is growing inside the womb, cells assemble spontaneously, rather than following a pre-established blueprint. This means vein patterns are one-offs. Veins also have the advantage of being enclosed by skin and, unlike fingerprints, can't be altered.

Black analyses mainly the backs, or the dorsum, of hands, as these tend to be predominantly visible in the footage she works with in criminal cases. She first maps a grid of 24 cells on to the hand, covering everything from fingernails to wrist. Then she analyses each cell, looking for identifying marks and studying vein patterns, drawing dark lines over them on-screen to make them more visible. The features she most commonly checks are veins, scars, freckles, birthmarks, moles, nails and skin creases on knuckles. Each one is scrutinised. For example, scars will be classified according to whether they are linear or non-linear, or surgical or accidental, and then by the direction in which they run. When she compares the accused's hand with the database, she can use geometrical formulae to work out the chances of anyone else having the same markings and vein patterns.

Black's database - she has now analysed 1,000 hands - throws up fascinating insights. For instance, you are most likely to get a linear scar on the tip of your second finger, or the middle of the back of your hand. No one seems to get moles on their little fingers, and if you have moles in the same places on both hands, it will be somewhere in the lower half of a triangle drawn between the knobs of your wrists and second knuckle.

On average, men have 50 per cent more scars than women, but right-handed men are more likely to scar their left hands, while right-handed women tend to scar their right - no one knows why. Black is fascinated by the stories that the hands in her database tell. One of her papers quotes lines from Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet: "By a man's finger-nails, by his coat-sleeve, by his boots, by his trouser-knees," declares Sherlock Holmes, "by the callosities of his forefinger and thumb, by his expression, by his shirt-cuff - by each of these things a man's calling is plainly revealed."

Sometimes a case challenges Black's methodology. In 2014, the Greater Manchester Police asked her to work on the case of paedophile Jeremy Oketch, a 30-year-old pharmacist who had twice raped a two-year-old girl and filmed the assaults. Although it was impossible to prove, the child's silent compliance suggested that she had been drugged. And although the police had 55 minutes of footage to examine, the only visible parts of the rapist were a hand and his penis.

The video was so distressing, recalls Black, that when judge Hilary Manley left the courtroom to view it, she returned visibly shaken. Was Black affected herself? "Images of child abuse affect everyone who views them," she says. "I feel anxious watching video because you don't know what's coming next. But you have to stay objective. It's not my place to go back to analyse the incident, it's my job to find something of value to the investigation."

Read on ....

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/sue-black-forensics-hand-markings-paedophiles-rapists

I welcome scientific forensic advancement, what worries me about modern times is human beings will be microchipped at birth.

aquila wrote:I welcome scientific forensic advancement, what worries me about modern times is human beings will be microchipped at birth.

DNA is already ahead of that.  Every person on the planet can be identified as an individual already.   Why bother with yesterday's technology ?


And, to put the other side of the argument, IF the reason for a microchip is to identify a person, why would we fear that ?
Who is fearful of being identified ?
Only those who wish to remain un-identified
And why would they wish to remain un-identified ?
 . . . .

Before long folk will be reticent to get out of bed in the morning for fear of being implicated in a criminal investigation or being tracked by some surveillance device.

Stick rigidly to science and keep well clear of these pseudo scientific tools said to assist character analysis.

I'm off now to buy a pair of good quality gauntlets, a balaclava, a jaunty trilby, a shell suit and a pair of good quality moon boots.

Nothing suspicious here....

PeterMac wrote:

aquila wrote:I welcome scientific forensic advancement, what worries me about modern times is human beings will be microchipped at birth.

DNA is already ahead of that.  Every person on the planet can be identified as an individual already.   Why bother with yesterday's technology ?


And, to put the other side of the argument, IF the reason for a microchip is to identify a person, why would we fear that ?
Who is fearful of being identified ?
Only those who wish to remain un-identified
And why would they wish to remain un-identified ?
 . . . .

That would depend on which greedy government, company or agency controls information.

Sticking a microchip into a human being at birth is on it's way I fear.

What a sad thing for humanity.

aquila wrote:

PeterMac wrote:

aquila wrote:I welcome scientific forensic advancement, what worries me about modern times is human beings will be microchipped at birth.

DNA is already ahead of that.  Every person on the planet can be identified as an individual already.   Why bother with yesterday's technology ?


And, to put the other side of the argument, IF the reason for a microchip is to identify a person, why would we fear that ?
Who is fearful of being identified ?
Only those who wish to remain un-identified
And why would they wish to remain un-identified ?
 . . . .

That would depend on which greedy government, company or agency controls information.

Sticking a microchip into a human being at birth is on it's way I fear.

What a sad thing for humanity.

We are already effectively micro chipped at birth, even before then. It is called DNA.
We are already effectively  micro chipped thanks to CCTV, social media where people willingly post there every moment online.
We have electronic tagging thanks to all the devices we use we leave a diogital trail, a digital finger print pretty much 24/7.
The only people who fear being tracked are those who do neferarious deeds.
Criminals.
If you commit no crimes then you have nothing to fear.

People fear the government may use it to control the population, protestors and the like, this is perhaps more likely in a dictatorship as often found in 3rd world countries such as Africa, or communist countries such as North Korea or Russia, then again they wouldn't really have a need for it given they already closely monitor their citizens anyway.

Democratic countries would have no need to monitor dissenters protesting about a tax etc.
It would make identifying victims easier, locating missing persons, terrorists, criminals.
Someone commits a crime and denies they were there when a quick check would provide their location at the time.
Would someone abduct a child knowing as soon as the child is reported missing, their location would be found based on their chip?
People could claim the chip could be removed.
It is possible but difficult as they are the size of a grain of rice and they tend to migrate.
It could also be set that an alarm goes off if it is removed as the temperature would be reduced ( a given range of normal would be set allowing for fever etc which would not be too much of an issue but a very low temp would be a cause for concern especially if their location reveals they are not somewhere cold and also if it were to show no heartbeat)
There is a lot of human body in which to find a grain of rice.
It means also that we could check someone suspected of being an illegal immigrant and deport them back to their home country especially repeat offenders, we could identify criminals, their crimes and where committed.
It would be an incentive not to break the law knowing they would be caught especially if we made sure sentences were long and prisons were not a nice place to be.

Oh Hobs you have no idea how much I disgree witb your simplistic view.

I keep it simple so everyone can understand

Hobs wrote:I keep it simple so everyone can understand

What you think and choose to spout in a 'simple' way is not simple at all.

Here is a conundrum for you Hobs.

If you were never offered religious education and you live in a Christian country with a society based on Christian principles with the right to be an atheist, would you choose to ask for a muslim girl to get a bullet in the head, would you choose to spend countless hours copying and pasting about a particular religion you can't stand, would you choose to damn the Catholic Church for its sins, and let's not forget the Anglican Church, the Jews and so many other religions.

Godless countries, whatever the base religion make the world a sad place.