This evidence is surprisingly sparse, and as PCAST notes, it is “distressing” that work to produce it did not begin until recently. The most credible data come from the only published large-scale study of fingerprint identification accuracy, which was conducted by FBI scientists themselves in 2011. The study involved 169 examiners, each comparing approximately one hundred pairs of latent and exemplar fingerprints. Its central finding was that very few erroneous identifications occurred: the false-positive rate was about one in six hundred.
