Chapter 24
The first scientific approach used to identify criminals, the Bertillon System, had been the bleeding-edge of forensics for more than 30 years when it was demonstrated at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis. Developed around 1870 by the chief of the French Judicial Identification Service, French anthropologist Alphonse Bertillon, his system—known widely as Bertillonage—measured and recorded the dimensions of criminals’ body parts, from their heads, spines, and feet to their tattoos, moles, and middle fingers. The delinquents’ data were then compiled and recorded on note cards by which police could later identify social miscreants, who often employed aliases and disguises when captured to confound the authorities.
Profiled “Vanity Fair” style by Ida Tarbell in 1894—who, years later, would achieve an equal pinnacle of fame muckraking John D. Rockefeller’s predatory Standard Oil Co.—Bertillon also helped standardize the use of mug shots and crime-scene photography, which along with his measurements, became a standard weapon in the crime fighters’ arsenal the world over. Rows of pictures of eyes, ears, and noses hung in police stations like a SOHO art installation to help constables ID criminals. Before the widespread availability of photograph and fingerprint databases, death masks had often been used to identify unknown deceased criminals since the late nineteenth century. Stored in police bureaus, the masks allowed law enforcement personnel from other areas to match them against perpetrators with whom they were familiar to determine if they had met their end.
World’s fairs didn’t just display the pioneers of forensic science; they laid the foundation of the surveillance state. After pickpockets pilfered thousands of attendees’ wallets and purses at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, Robert W. McClaughry, head of the Chicago police department, determined to avoid a similar crime wave for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in the Windy City. A true believer in Bertillon, McClaughry wielded the Frenchman’s system with the blunt force of a night stick, coordinating the mass accumulation of photographs and additional identifying metrics of newly sprung convicts not just regionally but also from around the entire United States. His McGruffian take-a-bite-out-of-crime effort was considered such a triumph of the modern scientific approach to police work that it spun off into the National Bureau of Criminal Identification in 1896, which later became the FBI.
Courtesy of the Missouri History Museum
For the 1904 expo, the International Association of the Chiefs of Police coordinated an international exhibit in the Charities and Corrections section that integrated representatives from London, Amsterdam, Lyons, France, and Japan. So widespread was Bertillon’s fame and reputation, the Japanese exhibit highlighted their use of his system to signify an embrace of modernity that coincided with their own industrial expos.
But Bertillonage’s extreme popularity obscured its imminent obsolescence, in part because of two other attendees at the fair: Captain James J. Parke of the New York State Prison Department, and Inspector Detective Sergeant John Kenneth Ferrier of New Scotland Yard, who set up booths displaying their agencies’ respective approaches to the emerging science of fingerprint identification. Ferrier, representing the legendary English detectives immortalized from Arthur Conan Doyle to Monty Python, came with a fingerprint classification system inferior to Parke’s but with a show-floor networking skill superior to his more introverted rival. Ferrier proselytized U.S. lawmen attending the fair in the more accurate forensic art of fingerprints and stayed on after the expo closed to continue his evangelizing around the country. The fair served as the springboard for the up-and-coming classification system.
For Bertillon—himself referenced in Doyle’s “The Hound of the Baskervilles”—the fair was an Icarus-like apogee before his long and slow descent. Bertillonage was adopted by the Chicago and Pittsburgh police departments, among others, and highlighted in early educational films to show children how easily they could be identified and incarcerated if they turned to crime. But its demise, caused by a perfect storm of technological advances and personal missteps, was as inevitable as the rotary phone’s: the publication of the world’s first text on fingerprint identification by Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton; misinterpretations of his measurement process by local, less-experienced authorities; Bertillon’s helping persecute the innocent Alfred Dreyfus on treason charges in France by sloppily misidentifying incriminating writing samples; and the eventual fallout from a 1903 incident when two prisoners at Leavenworth prison in Kansas were mistaken for the other, thanks to identical—but ultimately misleading—Bertillon metrics. After Norway, Sweden, Russia, and even France replaced Bertillonage with fingerprinting, Bertillon died in 1914 at age 61, embittered but confident that his system was still the best measure of misbehaving man.
Bertillon and his system were discredited but the concept behind them—that body parts and fluids could be used to track, identify, and permanently monitor an illicit population—spread with a speed that would impress pestilence and plague. By 1924, the FBI had become the largest domestic warehouse for fingerprints, even maintaining a Notorious Dead Criminals file, stocked with the fingerprints of underworld luminaries like “Legs” Diamond, “Ma” Barker, and Clyde Barrow. In 2014, the organization’s Next Generation Identification system achieved full operational capability, storing not just 100 million fingerprints, but also millions of criminal histories, mug shots, scar and tattoo photos, along with records of physical characteristics such as height, weight, and hair and eye color.
There are now more than 14,000 forensic scientists, their professional worlds shaped by trade fairs like the International Association for Identification Education Conference, the International Association of Bloodstain Pattern Analysts’ training conference, and the International Symposium on Human Identification. These expos’ myriad members specialize in high-tech investigations using DNA, footwear, tire-track, and blood-splatter analysis. The frontiers these groups represent may soon be unrecognizable to a Bertillon, with “Minority Report” tools such as NEC Corp.’s work on identifying individuals by the shape of their ear cavities; Jordan’s Mu’tah University’s research distinguishing people from the unique way they make the “V” sign; or Sheffield Hallam University’s Biomedical Research Centre’s study on detecting drug use through fingerprints by first dusting them with turmeric. Future generations—and future expos—will have to judge if the means for detecting crimes become something worse than the crimes themselves.