In the late nineteenth century, police agencies around the world used fingerprint identification methods to identify suspects, criminals, and victims of crime. Fingerprints were not used as a method of identifying criminals until the 19th century.
Police started using fingerprints in 1892 when an Argentinian officer named Juan Vucetich used them to solve a murder case. The first instance of fingerprints being used for suspect identification in the United States was in 1902, and they were first used to convict a murderer named Thomas Jennings in 1911.
Techniques to identify and classify fingerprints were developed in the late 19th century and accepted by British courts in 1901. For the first time, fingerprints have been used in criminal investigations.
The first U.S. police to use fingerprints to identify suspects was in October 1904. New York police and other states began using fingerprints to identify people. The state of New York and its prison system began using fingerprints for the first time in the United States against criminals from the United States. American police agencies quickly adopted the same methods, and the use of fingerprints became standard practice throughout the United States.
The Introduction of Fingerprinting to Forensics
The Federal Bureau of Prisons introduced a fingerprint system in 1903, and in 1905 the US Army began fingerprint identification. Starting in 1924, the FBI set up a fingerprint repository in its identification department. The FBI Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) was created in 1999 to create a national automated fingerprint database with a complete criminal history associated with each entry.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Scotland Yard began collecting fingerprint information through a classification system based on Henry and Sir Edward Richard Henry’s work to create the Central Fingerprint Office. Today, police in most countries use such systems, known as Automated Fingerprint Identification Systems (AFIS), to search millions of digitized fingerprint records.
Prior to the computerization of fingerprint files, there was no practical way to identify suspects using latent fingerprints left at the crime scene because police did not know which prints in a file matched those of a suspect to another suspect.
The Origins of Fingerprint Science
The pioneer of fingerprint identification was Sir Francis Galton, a trained anthropologist who was the first to show that fingerprints can be used to identify individuals. Galton and his corresponding Victorian Englishman, Sir Edward Henry, established a system that made fingerprint ID practical for law enforcement, and that was it. Sir Edward Richard Henry was a British civil servant stationed in India who began developing a system for identifying Indian criminals using fingerprints.
He and Dr. Henry Faulds discussed fingerprints as a means of personal identification and used printer ink as a method of collecting such fingerprints. They are credited with the first latent identification of a greasy fingerprint on an alcohol bottle. Both Galton and Falds discussed fingerprints as a way to identify people, but it was Galton who developed the first system for classifying and identifying fingerprints.
After several contracts, he noticed that two fingerprints, if identical, could be used for identification purposes. In 1892, he and his cousin published a book called Fingerprints, in which they outlined a system for classifying fingerprints, which was the first ever. In 1896, Dr. Faulds and Sir Edward Henry supplemented the technique with Galton’s man, Velasquez, who created his own classification system based, among other things, on the flow direction, pattern, and other characteristics of friction combs on fingerprints.
Early Applications of Fingerprinting to Investigations
Juan Vucetich was a police officer who used Galton’s insights to create a fingerprint system. He and Juan VUCETICH used G Walton’s research and his insights to produce the fingerprint identification of a murderer in 1892. He and another Argentine police officer carried out the first criminal fingerprint identification in the same year, when a bloody fingerprint was found on a doorpost. Around the same time, JUAN VUCHETICH was also a police officer in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and he developed his own variant of fingerprint systems.
Our shrewd gendarmes paid attention, and in October 1904 the municipal police department was the first in the country to set up a fingerprint office. In the same year, certain police groups began storing fingerprint files.
Following a meeting between the US Attorney General and representatives of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) and the US Department of Justice Bureau of Criminal Identification, the fingerprint collection was transferred to the Leavenworth prison in Washington D.C. in October 1923. St. Louis Worlds Fair joined more and more US police agencies and handed over fingerprints to the IACP and the FBI.
Fingerprints in America’s First Murder Case
The first murder case in the United States using fingerprints was in Illinois in 1910, when Thomas Jennings was charged with murdering Clarence Hiller after his fingerprints (Thomas Jennings) were found on Hillers “home. Their fingerprints were recognized by US courts as a reliable means of identification in 1911, when Thomas Jennings became the first American to be convicted of murder on the basis of fingerprints. Fingerprints only came to law enforcement after they were taken at the World Cup in a case of mistaken identity.
After successes in Argentina and India, Scotland Yard began to question whether it was using fingerprints as a useful system in England. Sir Edward Henry, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner in London, was interested in using criminal fingerprints. Scotland Yard’s famous detectives were the first to introduce a system in which fingerprints were used to identify suspects.
Sir Francis Galton, British anthropologist and cousin of Charles Darwin, and his cousin began their observations of fingerprints as a means of identification in the 1880s. Inspired by Galton’s work, Argentine policeman Juan Vucetich developed the first viable system for classifying fingerprints, a system that is still used in many Spanish-speaking countries. Britain, meanwhile, had a system for classifying patterns and shapes based on Galton, developed by Sir Edward R. Henry and accepted by Scotland Yard in 1901. This system and its variants have become the standard method of classifying fingerprints in the English-speaking world.