Best way to identify a missing person? It’s all in the soles of your feet
Japanese experts involved in the tsunami of 2011 say fingerprint identification could be a thing of the past when trying to identify someone
Efforts to identify bodies of victims of natural disasters or people with dementia who are under protective custody using the soles of the feet are underway in Japan as the system is expected to help speed up the identification process once it comes into effect.
The move is led by former members of Tokyo’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), who argue that skin ridge patterns of feet because they remain intact for one’s lifetime can serve like fingerprints since they are unique among individuals.
Akira Mitsuzane, 68, former head of the MPD’s first investigation division that handles crimes including murders and robberies, and Hideo Kaneko, 69, a former member of the MPD’s crime scene investigation division, came upon the idea of using feet ridge patterns after the earthquake and tsunami disaster in March 2011.
READ ON: Japanese police set up unit to stop yakuza ‘war’
They witnessed multiple cases in which family members of victims had the wrong bodies identified as police, who tried to return victims’ bodies to their families as quickly as possible, misidentified the bodies as they relied on victims’ clothing and other body traits for the identification.
“It takes time and money to conduct DNA analysis and you can’t always obtain fingerprints. For the purpose of identification (of bodies) alone, ridge patterns of feet have some more suitable characters,” said Kaneko.
Ridge patterns are usually taken from an area right under toes and they are preserved in many cases since the skin is thicker and the area protected by shoes, even though other parts of the body might be damaged in disasters.