Firearm examination: Examiner judgments and computer‐based comparisons

Mattijssen, Erwin J.A.T.; Witteman, Cilia; Berger, Charles E.H.; Zheng, Xiaoyu; Soons, Johannes A.; Stoel, Reinoud D.

doi:10.1111/1556-4029.14557

Cited by 15 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 66 publications

(115 reference statements)

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“…There are few studies on repeatability and reproducibility of forensic decisions. Other studies and other disciplines may use decision scales divergent from the AFTE Range [35, 36] or employ an experimental design more akin to a proficiency test, with many examiners comparing the same specimens [5, 62–64], and/or may not publish all data, severely limiting comparison to our results from paired examiners (either the same or different). Law and Morris [5] used replicas of fired cartridge cases to assess consensus among 17 firearms examiners conducting comparisons of 20 identical sample sets, each consisting of 1 questioned and 3 reference specimens.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Repeatability and reproducibility of comparison decisions by firearms examiners

Monson

Smith

Peters

2023

Journal of Forensic Sciences

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In a comprehensive study to assess various aspects of the performance of qualified forensic firearms examiners, volunteer examiners compared both bullets and cartridge cases fired from three different types of firearms. They rendered opinions on each comparison according to the Association of Firearm & Tool Mark Examiners (AFTE) Range of Conclusions, as Identification, Inconclusive (A, B, or C), Elimination, or Unsuitable. In this part of the study, comparison sets used previously to characterize the overall accuracy of examiners were blindly resubmitted to examiners to assess the repeatability (105 examiners; 5700 comparisons of bullets and cartridge cases) and reproducibility (191 examiners of bullets, 193 of cartridge cases; 5790 comparisons) of firearms examinations. Data gathered using the prevailing AFTE Range were also recategorized into two hypothetical scoring systems. Consistently positive differences between observed agreement and expected agreement indicate that the repeatability and reproducibility of examiners exceed chance agreement. When averaged over bullets and cartridge cases, the repeatability of comparison decisions (involving all five levels of the AFTE Range) was 78.3% for known matches and 64.5% for known nonmatches. Similarly averaged reproducibility was 67.3%% for known matches and 36.5% for known nonmatches. For both repeatability and reproducibility, many of the observed disagreements were between a definitive and inconclusive category. Examiner decisions are reliable and trustworthy in the sense that identifications are unlikely when examiners are comparing non‐matching items, and eliminations are unlikely when they are comparing matching items.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Repeatability and reproducibility of comparison decisions by firearms examiners

Monson

Smith

Peters

2023

Journal of Forensic Sciences

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“…No incentives were offered. European examiners were excluded due to limitations on shipping ammunition that required mutilation to render it unusable for reloading [ 87 ] and because many countries use alternative means of expressing their judgments in terms of degree of support for same- or different source [ 82 , 96 , 139 , [156] , [157] , [158] ], for which comparison or conversion to error rate is ambiguous. A decision was made to exclude any examiners currently employed by the FBI to avoid potential bias, even though some were not involved in the specimen preparation process.…”

Section: Project Execution: Testing and Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Planning, design and logistics of a decision analysis study: The FBI/Ames study involving forensic firearms examiners

Monson¹,

Smith²,

Bajic

2022

Forensic Science International: Synergy

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“…Professional examiners typically outperform novices on tasks within their domain of experience: facial examiners outperform novices on facial comparison (Phillips et al, 2018;White, Phillips, et al, 2015;White et al, 2020); fingerprint examiners outperform novices on fingerprint comparison (Busey & Vanderkolk, 2005;Tangen et al, 2011;Ulery et al, 2011); firearm examiners have a higher rate of correct matches than do standard computer algorithms in firearm comparison (Mattijssen et al, 2021); and document examiners are better at avoiding Bethany Growns and James D. Dunn contributed equally to this work.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Match me if you can: Evidence for a domain-general visual comparison ability

et al. 2022

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Visual comparison—comparing visual stimuli (e.g., fingerprints) side by side and determining whether they originate from the same or different source (i.e., “match”)—is a complex discrimination task involving many cognitive and perceptual processes. Despite the real-world consequences of this task, which is often conducted by forensic scientists, little is understood about the psychological processes underpinning this ability. There are substantial individual differences in visual comparison accuracy amongst both professionals and novices. The source of this variation is unknown, but may reflect a domain-general and naturally varying perceptual ability. Here, we investigate this by comparing individual differences (N = 248 across two studies) in four visual comparison domains: faces, fingerprints, firearms, and artificial prints. Accuracy on all comparison tasks was significantly correlated and accounted for a substantial portion of variance (e.g., 42% in Exp. 1) in performance across all tasks. Importantly, this relationship cannot be attributed to participants’ intrinsic motivation or skill in other visual-perceptual tasks (visual search and visual statistical learning). This paper provides novel evidence of a reliable, domain-general visual comparison ability.

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Firearm examination: Examiner judgments and computer‐based comparisons

Abstract: This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

Cited by 15 publications

References 66 publications

Repeatability and reproducibility of comparison decisions by firearms examiners

Repeatability and reproducibility of comparison decisions by firearms examiners

Planning, design and logistics of a decision analysis study: The FBI/Ames study involving forensic firearms examiners

Match me if you can: Evidence for a domain-general visual comparison ability

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