In an intriguing history that traverses the globe, taking us to India, Argentina, France, England, and the United States, Cole excavates the forgotten history of criminal identification--from photography to exotic anthropometric systems based on measuring body parts, from fingerprinting to DNA typing.
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He reveals how fingerprinting ultimately won the trust of the public and the law only after a long battle against rival identification systems. As we rush headlong into the era of genetic identification, and as fingerprint errors are being exposed, this history uncovers the fascinating interplay of our elusive individuality, police and state power, and the quest for scientific certainty.
Fingerprints and Other Biometrics
Cole, who received his Ph. Most of us still think of fingerprint analysis as a kind of gold standard of criminal forensics, expressly developed as an indisputable means of catching the bad guy.
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Cole points out that these Transport yourself back to mid-nineteenth century London, an overcrowded city rife with crime of the worst kind. The nineteenth century was a time of huge technological advances. Being a good scientist, he went so far as to scrape off the tips of his fingers to prove that fingerprints did not change when the skin grew back.
Of course, like any nineteenth-century scientist, he developed a rivalry with Sir William Herschel, a British civil servant in India who had been using fingerprints for identification since the s. He identified and classified fingerprints, calculating that the odds of two fingerprints being the same was billion. Elements of his system—the Galton details—are still in use today.
Henry in the Calcutta Anthropometric Bureau later Fingerprint Bureau , who fine-tuned what became known as the Henry system of classification of fingerprints in the s. In , Henry published a book: Classification and Uses of Fingerprints. On March 27, when my fictional Inspector Robert Curran would have been working with Scotland Yard , the bodies of an elderly couple, Thomas and Ann Farrow, were found bludgeoned to death in their residence above their paint shop.
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There was no sign of forced entry, but the cash box was empty, and there was evidence that two individuals had been involved in the assault. The fledgling Fingerprint Bureau found a smudgy fingerprint on the underside of the cash tin. The fingerprint on the cash box was identified as belonging to Alfred Stratton.
The fingerprint evidence was sorely tested at trial, but in the end, the Stratton brothers were convicted and hanged… the first murderers in the U. Singapore was not far behind England, with a Fingerprint Bureau established in Following a study visit to Scotland Yard in , W. Conlay later to become Commissioner of the Federated Malay States—watch for him in future Harriet Mysteries studied the Henry system and simplified the system for use in his own jurisdiction.