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Comment by vanattab | Hacker News Reader

How offen are people bitting people and only being id through the bite marks? Are there people sneaking into bedrooms biting people? I don't get it.

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I'd imagine it's not uncommon for bite marks to be at least one piece of evidence. Victim struggles, bites assailant, cops arrest somebody with a bite mark, suspect insists it's from some fun times with their SO and not from a victim defending themselves, cops call upon their pseudoscientists to "prove" that the bite mark came from the victim. Or another way around, a victim of a violent assault might have been bit while fighting off their attacker. In a grappling scenario, there is definitely a portion of the population who will instinctively use their teeth, from my experience in water polo, I'd reckon about a quarter of people.

Surely there must be tons of DNA when somebody gets bitten?

Even if the mere presence is not enough for a conviction, it should be enough to disprove that "fun times" explanation.

It's very hard to get a reliable DNA sample from the body of a different person.

Here's one such example of a biter, not in polo but football: https://www.businessinsider.com/luis-suarez-biting-history-2...

do people in water polo really bite each other? Sounds pretty vicious...

It's a vicious sport. More so in women's polo, where the brute strength range is a lot smaller than in men's. I played at the highschool level, where the violence is vicious, as opposed to the university level where I'd better describe it as "brutal". Players treat the game as team vs. team vs. referee, so it's basically a melee until you think you can flop a bit to get the ref to kick an opposing player out.

I've seen it happen once in over 15 years of playing it on a "Beer-team" level. 25% sounds a bit much but YMMV for region to region and level of play.

Maybe. Might also have something to do with your position. I was a whole set/whole D/bruiser for my high school teams, so I spent a lot more time in direct contact with other players than most.

When there are violent struggles, it's not actually that uncommon for bite marks to be present on victim or assistant.

*Source - I've seen lots of episodes of Forensic Files.

Too late to edit but...

*assailant

Some criminals MO is to bite. Before DNA testing was available, it might be all the cops had as evidence. My person opinion is it is only good enough for a clue, not evidence. I think the same of the blood spatter patterns and when cops do reconstructions of things to determine what happened.

Bloodstain analysis is, for the most part, also crap. [0]

We should be wary of many of the types of physical "evidence" popularized by crime shows; many of them are backed up mostly by propaganda rather than science.

[0] https://scholarship.shu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2125...

The murder of Sherri Rasmussen [1] comes to mind.

They caught the perpetrator decades later, mainly due to DNA traces left in the bite mark on the victim’s arm.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Sherri_Rasmussen

There was an HBO documentary series named Autopsy[0] I watched back in the 90s and two crimes stick out. The series mainly followed the case file of a Forensic Pathologist named Dr. Michael Baden.

If I can remember them correctly, one case was a murder that appeared as a break-in and a bite marking found on a garbage bag was tied back to the victim. The other was an inmate that left bite marks on a guard and tied the crime back to the inmate with.

It’s so interesting to see this research now and wonder what would come of those cases now that the main evidence is seemingly unreliable.

[0] https://www.hbo.com/autopsy

Typically it's a "man bites dog" kind of case. [ducks]

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