Stereotypes will forever be around in this world. From racial stereotypes to ethnic stereotypes, almost everyone on this planet has one associated to them whether or not they want it and it shows how it takes only one or two people to change how an entire society looks at a group or specific people. I was able to find an article on APA.ORG that really appealed to me since I am taking Criminal Justice and I have also taken forensics which includes identifying fingerprint analysis. Back in 2004, the FBI arrested a lawyer from Oregon named Brandon Mayfield after identifying his fingerprints that were on a bag of detonators near the site of the Madrid train bombings. But, Mayfield was wrongfully arrested and detained after mistakenly identifying his fingerprints as a main source of them on the bag of detonators.
Due to this error the FBI made, people started wondering if Mayfields background may have played a major part for the FBI to choose him as a subject. He has recently converted to Islam, married an Egyptian immigrant, and at one time, been an attorney for a convicted terrorist. This peaked my interest the most while reading it due to the fact that this fits what Americas known for. Placing people in situations just because of what they look like and who they are as a person. Mayfield was an Islam follower so that right there put the terrorist tag on him. And him being married to an Egyptian also strengthens that tag. And the fact that he was an attorney for a convicted terrorist doesn’t help since people see him as trying to help terrorist win in courts and in general. But that fact that he was in this situation and the people of the US noticed, but a bad name to the FBI since they were seen as stereotyping him in a sense.
“Are forensic examiners' match judgments biased by criminal stereotypes?” (APA.Org). Once made public of the official investigation, one of the FBI forensic examiners came out and said that their lab might have been more skeptical of their initial identification of Mayfield. After taking Forensics 1 this fall, I know a decent amount about fingerprinting and how the FBI’s database works. Long story short, it is not a 100% match to anyone until it is compared by hand. The database is there to give ideas of who they are looking for may be but it only compares certain parts of fingerprints. It can give false hits but it can show true hits to someone. My guess is that in this case, they got a hit and went with it instead of comparing his actual prints to the match. The FBI has over 70 million fingerprints in the system that goes from anyone in the government to anyone with a criminal history. That’s over a 1/700,000,000 chance they’ll get it right. So when they saw the initial match, they were then able to pull up information about the guy they pulled up and saw his background in his files and stereotyped him to the point they thought they had a match but in reality, they created a big issue for themselves since they showed flaws in the system at the time.
When this case had become apparent, there was a study made where the people participating in the experiment read a fake police report about one of two crimes: child molestation, which a stereotype associated to that is middle aged white men or identity theft, which doesn’t really have a stereotype behind it. The people involved were told that a fingerprint had been recovered from the crime scene and had been submitted to a fingerprint database, which returned a number of potential matches. They then viewed a profile of one of the database matches where half of them had a middle aged white man and the other half had a middle aged Asian woman. They then studied the pair of fingerprints and picked if they believed the prints were a match.
Come to find out that the fingerprints had nothing to do whit what was chosen. Most of the participants chose who they think fit best into the stereotype which is something that happens in today’s society. Where people are getting wrongly convicted of crimes they had no part of just because of what they look like and what their backgrounds are. It’s a major issue today but a lot of people don’t seem to take notice in that and that is a scary think to think. What if you got picked by mistake then thrown in prison for something you know you didn’t do but the world thinks you did do just because of what you look like? This must be fixed somehow.