Criminals often wear gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints, which makes the investigation of crimes more difficult.
In the era prior to contemporary advances in forensic science, the simple act of covering the hands often assured criminal assailants their anonymity if no witnesses were present during their offenses; thus a pair of gloves became the most essential and crucial tool for any successful perpetrator.
[2] In earlier decades, investigators would dust for fingerprints only to find smears and smudges caused by gloves.
With the advent of latent fingerprint detection in the late 20th century, investigators started to collect, analyze, and record prints left at crime scenes that were created by the wearing of gloves.
Today, latent fingerprints (first discovered on the surfaces of fabrics by investigators in the 1930s),[5] as well as DNA and incriminating bacteria can also be recovered from the inside of these discarded gloves.
[9] In 1971, the Metropolitan Police Service of London, England claims the first (or one of the first) convictions based on glove print-evidence.
[11] Starting in early 2009, law enforcement in Derbyshire, East Midlands, England began uploading hundreds of files of collected glove prints into their criminal database.