Forensic Dust Analysis: Prosecution Potential

New Forensics Technique to Recognize Dust on Offenders Can Result in Prosecution

Scientists have taken the first steps in developing a brand-new method of identifying the motions of lawbreakers using chemical analysis of dirt and dust discovered on devices, apparel, and cars. The finding system permits police or security services to match dirt remnants found on personal items to local soil samples to either implicate or eliminate visibility at a crime scene. The work is presented as a Keynote Lecture at the Goldschmidt Geochemistry Seminar after current publication.

Dr. Patrice de Caritat, Principal Research Study Scientist at Geoscience Australia, Australia’s public sector geoscience organization, said:

“We’ve done the very first trials to see if geochemical evaluation might narrow down a search area. We took a 260 km2 area of North Canberra, separated it into cells (squares) of 1 km x 1 kilometers, and sampled the dirt in each cell. We were then provided three samples from within the study area and asked to recognize which grid cells they came from. This was a ‘blind’ experiment to put it simply, we did not know where the samples came from up until the end of the experiment. For comparison, 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 an example. You can minimize the time, danger, and also investment of the regular examination. 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 Accessory Professor at the National Centre for Forensic Research Studies at the University of Canberra, claimed:

“This shows that our systems work and that we have a prospective brand-new tool for criminal and intelligence examinations. It’s the following stage which is possibly most fascinating. Many established countries have existing soil data sources, * used for such points as mineral exploration or land make use of choice assistance. We’re connecting our approaches to these databases to see if we can find samples from the database details instead of accumulating examples, particularly for each investigation.

Standard dirt analysis has already been used in Australia to determine and prosecute bad guys. For instance, soil analysis was used to recognize the motions of a guy that carried out a sexual assault on a young girl in Adelaide. There are numerous such examples. We now wish to make this better.”

Dr de Caritat worked with the Australian Federal Police in 2017-18, where he helped them establish their capacity to evaluate soils for forensic areas. He said:

” Geoscience Australia is currently dealing with the Australian Federal Authorities, the College of Adelaide, Flinders College as well as the College of Canberra on a Support Department task to incorporate ecological DNA (e.g. from local plants) and X-Ray Diffraction mineralogy right into the soil and dust area system.”

Commenting, Professor Jennifer McKinley (Queen’s University, Belfast) said ‘The development in Dr de Caritat’s work is that it incorporates durable compositional information analysis of the multivariate geochemical information into forensic geoscience and also applies this in an ingenious way to forensic soil provenance’.

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