The Footwear unit teaches the students to recognize a suspect shoeprint, photograph it and collect it through casting.  Casting is done with dental stone (the same material used by dentists to cast teeth) as it hardens relatively quickly and becomes extremely hard.  The casts below were all created by the students during a mock investigation.  Both shoe prints and tire marks were cast and collected, taken back to our "lab" and compared to two dimensional exemplars of suspect shoes.  They look for individual characteristics that differentiate one shoe from the other.