Two hundred and some years ago, a little girl living in a cottage near some marshland in Scotland was killed in her home. Her last name was Richardson. The investigating constable located footprints nearby and followed them. They led him to a few drops of blood and a bloody handprint. The constable interpreted this footwear impression evidence: determining they were boot prints; that there were numerous nails in the outsold; that they were made by a running man, and that the boots had recently been patched.
He made a rude plaster cast of the impressions. Later, at the victim's funeral, he compared that cast against the people who'd come to pay their respects. In this way he was able to identify the suspect and, with that done, pursue other evidence collection to use against him.
A little over a hundred years ago, Colonel Sir Baden-Powell wrote, "...we can read a great amount of information... from the ground at our feet. We can see by the absence or presence of tracks whether an enemy is about in the country we are in, and we can follow him up whether he is a large force or merely a patrol, and so find out how he is posted, and so on... with a little practice yon [sic] will be able to recognize the track of one man, or one horse, from another by the shape of feet, length of stride, etc." The good Colonel insisted that any scout had to have a talent for tracking, and be able to interpret what he'd found, else he wouldn't be much of a scout at all.
He compared their job to the police of the time. "Being able to track is of little use unless you can also read the meanings of the tracks. In tracking you find a lot of small signs, and then comes in the art of 'putting this and that together' and so getting information from them. This is the first step in detective work, and a detective's work is very much like that of a scout, who has to notice every little sign with regard to an enemy and then to read their meanings."
Twenty-nine years ago, detectives and constables of Koevoet in South-West Africa were deployed to Tsintsabis (after some headbutting with the local Army forces). There a grandmother and a young girl were shot and a younger boy's brains smashed out against the wheel of a tractor by PLAN insurgents. They examined bloodstains and spoor at a house at the house and reconstructed what had happened, including the presence of at least one man in Grasshopper brand hockey boots.
Going out in a twenty km wide cast for spoor, they located the spoor of nearly thirty men heading across country. One of them was wearing Grasshopper brand hockey boots. The constables, carrying two days of rations with their kit, set out after their quarry, tracking them for two over hundred kilometers over the next five days across difficult terrain. At 14:30 hours on the fifth day they caught up them and a fight ensued, continuing late into the afternoon. Eight insurgents were killed, many of the rest captured. The leader of the group was wearing Grasshopper brand hockey boots.
Two weeks ago patrol officers in a large municipality in the Midwest were called to a residence for a report of a peeping tom the night before. Upon arrival, a cursory examination of the exterior of the house located footprints in the soil outside the window of the children's room. There was also semen on the ground. When it was suggested that a reserve officer (a trained tracker) be called to the scene, the suggestion was dismissed out of hand.
Why do you suppose that is?
Not a lack of intelligence or dedication to duty on the part of the responding officers. They called out detectives, samples of the semen were taken and whatnot. Their thought was, the crime occurred in an urban area - there aren't any significant tracks leading away, and they would be lost on the pavement even if there were.
This is a lack of understanding on the part of the patrolmen, and later the detectives, regarding what should be a fundamental evidence gathering skillset.
Perhaps there were no tracks leading away, but trackers follow subtle clues, small impressions and easy-to-miss spoor far more often than they actually walk along a ready-made trail of good footprints. Perhaps they would have been lost when they hit the pavement, but what about additional information that might have been gleaned from what was there or perhaps was not there.
What about the most obvious question of all? Where did he come from? Was there a trace clue on the top of the privacy fence leading to a neighbor? Were there repetitive or overlapping impressions to show he'd come in from one side of the house particularly? How did he know where the children's bedroom was? Had he been scouting it, or was he an acquaintance?
A tracker - who, contrary to the cliché that depicts all trackers as woods-savvy outdoorsmen or Stetson wearing county deputy, can be a policeman in a dress uniform in the middle of a metropolitan area - will learn a lot about a suspect from footwear impressions and other spoor. Our pedophile peeping-tom - was he right or left handed? The position of the footprints outside the window, taken in context with the position of the semen on the ground, might have told us. Knowing he's probably left-handed certainly narrows the number of suspects. A proper analysis of the print itself, in addition to telling us what kind of shoe he was wearing, would likely have given us his approximate height. The length of his stride, the pitch and straddle of any other impressions he left behind, they might have revealed an old or recent injury, and whether or not he knew the area or not.
Make no mistake, there are law enforcement officers who know how to track, and they're not all Game Wardens or rural deputy sheriffs. Unfortunately they are few and far between, especially in municipal and metropolitan departments. Tracking isn't just finding footprints. It's locating all the spoor left behind; much of it as specific and significant as blood spatter or fingerprints - then interpreting it all in the context of the scene and other information to form some sort of conclusion about what had to occur in order to leave that type of spoor in the first place. Much of it can be photographed and cataloged like any other physical evidence, and with enough surety to guarantee its use in court.
Suggest to police officials that a couple of days of tracking should be taught in the academy or at in-service and you will likely get that look typically reserved for emotionally disturbed people at Amish barn-raisings.
We're going to work on that.
