Over the past decade, with increasing scientific scrutiny on forensic reporting practices, there have been several efforts to introduce statistical thinking and probabilistic reasoning into forensic practice. These efforts have been met with mixed reactions—a common one being scepticism, or downright hostility, towards this objective. For probabilistic reasoning to be adopted in forensic practice, more than statistical knowledge will be necessary. Social scientific knowledge will be critical to effectively understand the sources of concern and barriers to implementation. This study reports the findings of a survey of forensic fingerprint examiners about reporting practices across the discipline and practitioners’ attitudes and characterizations of probabilistic reporting. Overall, despite its adoption by a small number of practitioners, community-wide adoption of probabilistic reporting in the friction ridge discipline faces challenges. We found that almost no respondents currently report probabilistically. Perhaps more surprisingly, most respondents who claimed to report probabilistically, in fact, do not. Furthermore, we found that two-thirds of respondents perceive probabilistic reporting as ‘inappropriate’—their most common concern being that defence attorneys would take advantage of uncertainty or that probabilistic reports would mislead, or be misunderstood by, other criminal justice system actors. If probabilistic reporting is to be adopted, much work is still needed to better educate practitioners on the importance and utility of probabilistic reasoning in order to facilitate a path towards improved reporting practices.

中文翻译：

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珠穆朗玛峰——我们将失去很多：指纹检查员对概率报告态度的调查

在过去的十年中，随着对法医报告实践的科学审查越来越多，已经有一些努力将统计思维和概率推理引入法医实践。这些努力得到了不同的反应——一个常见的反应是对这个目标持怀疑态度，或完全敌对。要在法医实践中采用概率推理，需要的不仅仅是统计知识。社会科学知识对于有效理解关注的来源和实施障碍至关重要。本研究报告了对法医指纹检查员关于跨学科报告实践以及从业人员对概率报告的态度和特征的调查结果。总的来说，尽管它被少数从业者采用，在摩擦脊学科中，在社区范围内采用概率报告面临挑战。我们发现目前几乎没有受访者进行概率报告。也许更令人惊讶的是，大多数声称以概率方式报告的受访者实际上并没有。此外，我们发现三分之二的受访者认为概率报告是“不恰当的”——他们最常见的担忧是辩护律师会利用不确定性，或者概率报告会误导或被其他刑事司法系统参与者误解。如果要采用概率报告，仍然需要做很多工作来更好地教育从业者概率推理的重要性和实用性，以促进改进报告实践的道路。