The mechanism for assigning all errors to the category of “human
error” is attributing them to “incompetence.” Elsewhere I have explored the
sociological dimensions of the fingerprint profession’s mechanisms for
sacrificing practitioners who have committed exposed false positives on the
altar of incompetence, in order to preserve the credibility of the technique
itself.343 In fingerprint identification, incompetence is said to be the cause
of all known cases of error—at least all of those that are not assigned to
outright fraud or malfeasance. These attributions of incompetence, as we
shall see, are made in a retrospective fashion and without evidence. In
short, the only evidence adduced in favor of the claim that the examiner was
incompetent is the same thing incompetence is supposed to explain: the
exposed misattribution. Incompetence then supports a variant on the “zero
methodological error rate” argument: the claim that “the technique” is
infallible as long as “the methodology” is applied correctly. Again,
attributions of incorrect application of the methodology are made in a
retrospective fashion without evidence. It is the exposed error that tells us
that correct procedures were not followed.