Today in History: Police try a new method of identifying people... fingerprints

It seems a bit bizarre to imagine that there was ever any other method of identification but when you really look at how small the differences are between one person's prints and another's, it is kind of easy to understand why it took so long. It was introduced to the St.Louis police department today 115 years ago.

The year was 1904

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Prior to St. Louis adapting this approach, the world was already quite aware of the unique nature of a person's fingerprints, but it hadn't yet been established that there are no two set of identical prints (which is something I'm still a little apprehensive to believe.) However, their extremely small nature didn't make using them as a form of identification terribly feasible in most situations.

Prior to 1904 police departments categorized people based on photographs, height, and by measuring bony parts of the body or "Bertillon measurements" and this had normally proven sufficient.... until it didn't.

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In Leavenworth Prison in Kansas in 1903 a man named Will West was being admitted and all the measurements were taken. As luck would have it, the prison already housed a criminal by the name of William West. The men were virtually identical in every way including their Bertillon measurements. Their individual mugshots are above and I promise you, that is not a shot of the same person twice. Will and William were not related by blood in any way that could be determined but there was some suspician that they were identical twins separated at birth. The Williams duo were not lying, they honestly didn't know one another.

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And that's how the story goes. Someone came over from Scotland Yard to train the St. Louis police force how to properly categorize fingerprints and the unique identifier, at least from a criminology point of view, was put into use in St. Louis. It was such a success that this practice quickly spread to a national level and the eventual need for centralized "database" was a major driving force in the creation of the FBI.

An actual nation-wide and easily accessible central storage record was not established until the early 1980's and even then it didn't have any real widespread use because well, computers were still pretty shit back then. These days hundreds of millions of fingerprints are searchable online by law-enforcement agencies in a number of minutes. There are 300,000 searches conducted daily.

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I'm one of those people that doesn't really like to be part of the system but when i was a kid I remember that every school kid got to go on a free "field trip" to a local police station. It was a lot of fun and we enjoyed it, however, all of "got to have our fingerprints taken!" in what i can only now believe was a really inventive way for the police force to get everyone on file in a kind of devious manor.

There is no denying the power of this unique identifier and recently the existence of this bio metric technology becoming more accessible is actually becoming problematic for me personally. Thailand has recently introduced a fingerprint scan that is part of every person's ability to enter the country - you can not refuse to be part of it. Therefore, all the people like me that simply flew home to get a new passport whenever they started to have "too many stamps" can no longer use this workaround.

Despite the fact that all nations combined have billions of fingerprints on their own, there isn't a tremendous amount of information that is shared across nations. Interpol is the only agency that freely provides this information to member nations and their database contains the bio-metric data of a mere 120,000 people - normally the most wanted and feared criminals on the planet.

Someone was always going get the ball rolling on this eventually but St. Louis was the first and it was inspired by the truly unique situation involving Will and William West!