http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=2187105#.UCv5HallTUc
After reading this article, I feel as a person living in today’s society feel a little sad and disappointed. To me this plain outright sounds ridiculous. How can you compare a walk or gait to something and concrete as a fingerprint or DNA. Is it me or is society trying every possible way of identifying a criminal in any possible way. Making any irrelevant thing we do on a day to day basis a way of identifying us or linking it to something to refer us to a category of some sort. The article says that every person has a their own unique way of walking and that you can use technology to help recognize what kind of walk to who it is. But I do not think that is right in saying you can relate a walk to a type of person. Just because someone who walks a certain way does not mean that all people who walk the same way are also the same person. For instance, a child who follows a rigorous training in a sport develops a certain type of gait and another child the same thing, but one becomes a criminal and the other does not. That does not mean the one child who is not a criminal will eventually be one and a walk has no link to a mental reasoning behind criminality. And who says a person committing a crime will have the same exact walk when is doing the crime to when he strolls along everyday. The argument is invalid to me.
Generally, scientists believe that each person has their own unique walking style. As you said, criminal confirmation technique based on such walking style cannot be as detailed certain as checking fingerprint or DNA. However, for example, one person may try hard to change one’s writing style, but each individual’s unique handwriting cannot be hidden and is used in criminal investigation at times. Similarly, if criminal confirmation technique using walking style can be used in the right way, I personally think that it can be useful in criminal investigations. For example, according to the biological engineering principle and theory that each person has one’s own walking style, if walking style patterns of ex-convicts are stored in databases along with fingerprint and DNA data in order to track down criminals from civilians, problems will be exist certainly. However, if the criminal’s walking style is already captured in CCTV, I believe it can be effective at times if investigation is carried out based on the criminal’s walking style in the CCTV. For example, even if a criminal hides his or her appearance by wearing a hat, sunglass, wig, fake mustache, etc, the walking style will be shown as is in the CCTV. Meaning, storing walking style patterns of ex-convicts in a database and setting a standard, then trying to determine the criminal by this method is not appropriate. But, I believe that investigation method by criminal’s walking style captured in individual CCTV can be considered.