Glove prints, also sometimes described as gloveprints or glove marks, are latent, fingerprint-like impressions that are transferred to a surface or object by an individual who is wearing gloves.
Many criminals often wear gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints, which makes the crime investigation more difficult. Although the gloves act as a protective covering for the wearer's prints, the gloves themselves can leave prints that are sometimes unique like human fingerprints, thus betraying the wearer. After collecting glove prints, law enforcement can then match them to gloves that they have collected as evidence as well as glove prints retrieved from other crime scenes.
History
Since the advent of fingerprint detection, many criminals have resorted to the wearing of gloves during the commission of their crimes in order to avoid leaving their fingerprints as evidence. In the era prior to contemporary advances in forensic science, the simple act of covering the hands often assured criminal assailants their anonymity if no witnesses were present during their offenses; thus a pair of gloves became the most essential and crucial tool for any successful perpetrator.
In earlier decades, investigators would dust for fingerprints only to find smears and smudges caused by gloves. Often in earlier decades these smudges were ignored because very little of their detail was retrievable. With the advent of latent fingerprint detection in the late 20th century, investigators started to collect, analyze, and record prints left at crime scenes that were created by the wearing of gloves. Glove prints can be as simple as marks caused by seams or folds in fabric of a glove, or they can be as complex as marks left behind by the grain or texture of the fabric of a glove. When gloves are collected as evidence their prints can be taken and compared to glove prints that were taken at crime scenes or from evidence.
Offenders who wear gloves tend to use their hands and fingers very freely, and thus, because their gloves give them a false sense of protection, leave easily distinguishable glove prints on the surfaces they handle. If when either a fingerprint is able to pass through a glove, or when, because of holes in a glove, finger and glove prints appear together, investigators are now able to better distinguish between prints made by friction ridges and prints made by gloves. Many times this also happens because criminals also opt to wear gloves that are both tight-fitting and relatively short, which makes the occurrence of prints being made by the butt of the palm and the wrist (palm prints) more common as the gloves may slip, thus exposing areas of the skin that may leave prints. Also, many times criminals would discard their gloves at crime scenes or hide them nearby. Today, latent fingerprints (first discovered on the surfaces of fabrics by investigators in the 1930s), as well as DNA and incriminating bacteria can also be recovered from the inside of these discarded gloves.
In many jurisdictions the act of wearing gloves itself while committing a crime can be prosecuted as an inchoate offense.
By the 1950s, after over a half century of frustration due to the wearing of gloves by assailants, fingerprint experts began studies to determine how it may be feasible to detect and compare glove prints found at crime scenes.
In 1971, the Metropolitan Police Service of London, England claims the first (or one of the first) convictions based on glove print-evidence. Glove-prints were found on a broken window and were later matched to the gloves of a suspect.
In 2005, a German forensic scientist and engineer carried out various empirical studies on glove prints. The manufacturing engineer carried out basic research into the manufacturing techniques of gloves to determine individual and functional characteristics of the glove surfaces. This included purely textile gloves, coated textile gloves (also dotted gloves), as well as gloves made of dipping forms and leather or artificial leather gloves, together with combinations of the aforementioned surfaces. He also developed the anatomical effects of the hand when creating glove prints. At the same time, many Landeskriminalamt began to transfer glove prints into their databases of traces. Since 2012, glove prints are an inherent part of the education of forensic experts at the Bundeskriminalamt (Germany) (Division KT – Forensic Science Institute).