Write about your experience with this comparison and the characteristics you saw.

At a crime scene, footwear impressions can be left behind in dust, mud, snow, blood, etc. These impressions can be compared to shoes recovered from a suspect. In this assignment you will be making a footwear impression and comparing it to your shoe. Instructions: • Create or find a footwear impression in your house or outside. For this assignment it is best to use an older shoe with a lot of wear. You can step in mud, dirt, or sand, put some ink or paint on the bottom of an old shoe and step on paper, or whatever method you can find with the materials in your house. • Take some photographs of your footwear impression with a ruler in the picture. Try to use a flashlight from different angles to bring out detail within the impression, especially if you create a three-dimensional one in a soil material. • Take a photograph of the bottom of the shoe that made the impression and then examine it. What characteristics in the wear of the shoe (areas that are worn down from use), damage to the shoe (nicks, cuts, scratches, chunks of the bottom missing, etc.), or temporary characteristics (gum, mud, stickers on the bottom) do you see? • Compare that to your impression. Can you see the same characteristics? • Write about your experience with this comparison and the characteristics you saw. How can this type of evidence aid an investigation and determine the source of an impression at a crime scene? Include at least one photo of the impression and one photo of the bottom of the shoe. You can circle the areas that are similar between the two to demonstrate what you saw during the examination.