Eli5: Does hastily swiping off fingerprints from steering wheels, doorhandles, etc. actually prove to be effective?

328 views

I see this in various shows and movies, and it always leaves me wondering if it’s actually gonna do them any good in not getting tracked down.

In: 297

10 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Basically, yeah. Fingerprints are usually very fragile, theyre generally just faint impressions left by oil and dust on your hand. Pretty easy to smear and make completely unusable. Unless you had a lot of dust on your hand and touched something pretty sticky, but if that’s not the case, a quick wipe down with moderate pressure will render almost every fingerprint that it touches unusable.

These days the real kicker is DNA. Much harder to clean up all the hairs etc you may leave around a scene.

You are viewing 1 out of 10 answers, click here to view all answers.