Advertisement Baltimore County police show off new crime lab technology Experts say fingerprint, smartphone analysis improved in recent years Share Shares Copy Link Copy

The Baltimore County Police Department gave 11 News an inside look at their forensics unit Thursday as part of National Forensic Science Week.The week is meant to highlight the work that's done in crime labs around the country to show how forensic scientists assist in criminal investigations. Baltimore County's crime lab on Thursday showed off its new technology.Irv Litofsky, the county's director of forensic services, told 11 News that the biggest shift for the department in recent years was moving their focus from computers to mobile devices.Lab workers said getting data off smartphones is involved in nearly all current investigations. They said they can find the exact location of where a picture was taken and get information that people may have thought was long gone."We can get any information that's been deleted from these devices to try to be able to put a history together for the investigators to try to determine what may have occurred," Litofsky said.With the new tools, police can recover texts or pictures that had been deleted but are still in the phone's memory. Litofsky said a few years ago, that wasn't possible."Cellphones have become like computers, and we can do what we call a full forensic examination of the phone," he said.As far as fingerprinting goes, investigators said new equipment has helped tremendously to preserve and heighten that process."We've been looking at latent fingerprints for over 100 years. Up until the last few years, the only tool we used was a magnifying glass," Litofsky said. "Now we've install a digital system that allows us to scan the prints, to examine them on the computer and to record all of the mechanics and points of that identification."He said it also allows them to keep a completely clean copy so, if there's a need for a second opinion in court, that examiner won't be influenced by the first examiner's opinion."With the old system, marks were made and things were written down (on the fingerprint page), and we couldn't have a second examiner look from zero. They always had the first examiner's notes. This way, we get a completely unbiased second opinion of a clean copy," Litofsky said.