From this academic year, the University's Faculty of Law has a pioneering criminalistics laboratory in Spain with these characteristics. In it, you can learn and investigate the three main branches of classical criminalistics: forensic ballistics, lophoscopy and documentoscopy graphics. To the most modern technical materials, similar to those used in the official laboratories of Criminalistics and Scientific Police, is added a teaching staff of recognized prestige and experience, both nationally and internationally. These ingredients provide a unique training for students of the Degree in Criminology.

Determining the type of weapon, the intention to shoot and the possible accidentality of firing a weapon with a safety mechanism are some of the skills that students will learn. As Professor Adolfo Busta indicates, "the work tools, the necessary microscope, the databases and the bibliography, together with the experience of the teaching staff, allow students to work in a normal criminal situation, in such a way that we have the same work procedures and the necessary tools to fulfill precisely that specialist function, in this case, in forensic ballistics”.

With the help of theoretical-practical classes, students will be able to compare the traces of the crime scene to identify the offender through lophoscopy, determine if a ticket is real or false thanks to the video spectrum comparator, carry out visual inspections with a forensic briefcase or compare writing through graphonomics techniques.

As Adolfo Busta, professor of the degree with more than 20 years´ of experience, says: “with the so-called ballistic traces that remain at the scene of the crime, a lot of data is known, which, if well treated, can provide valuable information for the investigation of what has happened and how it happened”.

Another area that is studied in the laboratory is documentoscopy graphics. Knowing if a lottery ticket or a €50 note is fake is easier if you know the techniques explained by Professor José Martín, who deals with “the analysis of the security elements contained in both identity documents and passports, driving licences, DNI identity cards, etc., such as means of payment and paper money”. In the laboratory, students study security contrasts to verify the existence of watermarks, holograms, security threads or fluorescent inks, among other things. Likewise, by means of a detailed graphonomic analysis it is possible to determine the authenticity or falsity of a signature or the identification of a handwritten text.

Lophoscopy or how the identification of people is carried out through fingerprints, is learned by students by doing fingerprint reviews and by revealing fingerprints. Professor Vicente Lago teaches them to do it "on different objects, either on flat surfaces such as a table or a wall, or also on objects that are collected at the crime scene, such as a bottle". They even acquire knowledge about the technical-scientific fingerprint regeneration procedures that are applied to unidentified corpses, as well as the action protocols for the identification of victims in Major Disasters. In short, with the lophoscopic training they learn the study and comparison of fingerprints to identify a person with the possible candidates.