Bertillon System

[Fidelia Boldul]

AlphonseBertillon used photography and measurement to create a record of unique identifiers that could be used to track suspects, inmates, and repeat offenders. His system depended on a complicated filing method that cross-referenced a standardized set of identifying characteristics, making the information retrievable. From a mass of details, recorded on hundreds of thousands of cards, it was possible to sift and sort down the cards until a small stack of cards produced the combined facts of the measurements of the individual sought. The cards were arranged to make efficient use of space. The identification process was entirely independent of names and the final identification was confirmed by the photographs included on the individual's card. Although it was somewhat difficult to use, modernizers in many countries took it as a model system for tracking and controlling individual citizens and immigrants.

Bertillon devised a method to document and study the victim's body and circumstances of death. Using a camera on a high tripod, lens facing the ground, a police photographer made top-down views of the crime scene to record all the details in the immediate vicinity of a victim's body. Early in the 20th century, police departments began to use Bertillon's method to photograph murder scenes.

He is also the inventor of the mug shot. Photographing of criminals began in the 1840s only a few years after the invention of photography, but it was not until 1888 that Bertillon standardized the process.

After being expelled from the Imperial Lyce of Versailles, Bertillon drifted through a number of jobs in England and France, before being conscripted into the French army in 1875. Several years later, he was discharged from the army with no real higher education, so his father arranged for his employment in a low-level clerical job at the Prefecture of Police in Paris. Thus, Bertillon began his police career on 15 March 1879 as a department copyist.

Being an orderly man, he was dissatisfied with the ad hoc methods used to identify the increasing number of captured criminals who had been arrested before. This, together with the steadily rising recidivism rate in France since 1870,[3] motivated his invention of anthropometrics. He did his measurements in his spare time. He used the famous La Sant Prison in Paris for his activities, facing jeers from the prison inmates as well as police officers.

Bertillon also created many other forensics techniques, including the use of galvanoplastic compounds to preserve footprints, ballistics, and the dynamometer, used to determine the degree of force used in breaking and entering.

The nearly 100-year-old standard of comparing 16 ridge characteristics to identify latent prints at crime scenes against criminal records of fingerprint impressions was based on claims in a 1912 paper Bertillon published in France.[4]

Using a complex system of measurements, he attempted to prove that Dreyfus had disguised his handwriting by imitating his own handwriting as if someone else was doing so, so that if anyone thought the bordereau was in Dreyfus's hand, he would be able to say that someone else had forged his writing. Both courts martial evidently accepted this, and Dreyfus was convicted. The verdict of the second court martial caused a huge scandal, and it was eventually overturned.

Bertillon was by many accounts regarded as extremely eccentric. According to Maurice Palologue, who observed him at the second court-martial, Bertillon was "certainly not in full possession of his faculties". Palologue goes on to describe Bertillon's argument as "... a long tissue of absurdities", and writes of "... his moonstruck eyes, his sepulchral voice, the saturnine magnetism" that made him feel that he was "... in the presence of a necromancer".[5]

Bertillon claimed that his graphological system was based on mathematical probability calculus. A later analysis undertaken in 1904 by three renowned mathematicians, Henri Poincar, Jean Gaston Darboux, and Paul mile Appell, concluded that Bertillon's system was devoid of any scientific value and that he had failed both to apply the method and to present his data properly.[6] With this key evidence against Dreyfus debunked, he was finally acquitted in 1906.

Although the system was based in scientific measures, it was known to have its flaws. For example, it may not have been able to accurately apply to children or women, as it was mostly designed for men who had reached full physical maturity and had short hair.[8]

In the late 19th and 20th centuries black women who were working as prostitutes in Minneapolis, Minnesota became known as "alley workers". The Minneapolis Police Department followed the Bertillon system as a means to identify and document the crimes of these alley workers. The system soon became used as a tool to police and categorise these women.

In order to bypass the system many black women would use aliases instead of their real names. The most common name that was used as an alias was "Mamie", which was also the alias used by Mamie Knight, who was the only surviving photo of an alley worker during the department's period of using the Bertillon system. Her photo is currently located in the St. Paul police department archives.[9]

In 1893, New York State's Prison Department was experiencing the same difficulties as every other police agency and criminal institution throughout the world. There was simply no accurate way to identify, and thereby appropriately incarcerate, recidivists. Too many hardened criminals were being sentenced as first offenders.

Bertillonage, the invention of French ethnologist Alphonse Bertillon, had been introduced in Paris ten years earlier and by the time of Baker's visit had become the standard method of criminal Identification throughout most of Europe.

Bertillon, born in 1853, was a rebellious young man who had tried a variety of careers before his family's influence secured a position for him with the Prefecture of the Paris Police on March 15, 1879.

A life-long interest in anthropology coupled with the alarming disarray of the police department's identification system led Bertillon to begin experimenting with ways to accurately identify criminals.

Bertillon took measurements of certain bony portions of the body, among them the skull width, foot length, cubit, trunk and left middle finger. These measurements, along with hair color, eye color and front and side view photographs, were recorded on cardboard forms measuring six and a half inches tall by five and a half inches wide.

By dividing each of the measurements into small, medium and large groupings, Bertillon could place the dimensions of any single person into one of 243 distinct categories. Further subdivision by eye and hair color provided for 1,701 separate groupings.

Upon arrest, a criminal was measured, described and photographed. The completed card was indexed and placed in the appropriate category. In a file of 5,000 records, for example, each of the primary categories would hold only about 20 cards. It was therefore not difficult to compare the new record to each of the other cards in the same category. If a match was discovered, the new offense was recorded on the criminal's card.

In the winter of 1881, the Prefecture retired and his replacement agreed to implement the system. It was officially adopted by the Paris Police in 1882 and quickly spread throughout France, Europe and the rest of the world. In 1887 it was introduced into the United States by Major R. W. McClaughry, warden of the Illinois State Penitentiary.

Standardization of the Bertillon System throughout the civilized world meant, for the first time in recorded history, that any individual, once properly classified, could be positively identified at a later date. The benefit to police agencies was incalculable; claims that this system would deplete the ranks of the professional criminals, however, were somewhat overly-optimistic and premature.

In the nineteenth century, Alphonse Bertillon, a French policeman, was the first to introduce the science of identifying a person based on his/her anatomical features. To identify repeat offenders, Alphonse built a set of tools known today as the Bertillon System. These tools were used to measure certain anatomical traits of a person including eleven different body measurements such as the height, length, and breadth of the head, the width of cheeks, the length of different fingers, the length of forearms, etc.

The image above shows an illustration of the process for acquiring the forearm measurements. These measurements were then recorded on an identity card, and/or were manually compared to a record database to check if the same person was convicted before. The system was used until 1903 when it was replaced by fingerprint records, but a few elements of the Bertillon System exist even today in the criminal police identification process, such as the combination of profile and frontal shots (mug shots) when photographing offenders.

A fingerprint refers to the flow of ridge patterns in the tip of the finger. The ridge flow exhibits irregularities in local regions of the fingertip termed as minutiae points. In 1892, Sir Francis Galton introduced the minutiae features for fingerprint matching. Since then, the distribution of these minutiae points along with the associated ridge structure has been believed to be distinctive to each fingerprint and has been used in individual identification records in police offices.

Fingerprints recognition systems are considered to be a reliable method to recognize individuals and are used in different biometric applications, such as physical access control, border security, watch list, background check, and national ID systems.

The uniqueness of a fingerprint is predominantly determined by the local ridge characteristics and their relationships, and matching fingerprints manually to claim that two impressions belong to the same person, requires complex protocols that have been used by examiners. Over the last three decades, research in fingerprint recognition has seen tremendous growth. However, most automatic fingerprint matchers follow similar protocols as human examiners and depend on the ridge characteristics of fingerprints. These characteristics (fingerprint features) can be organized in a hierarchical order at three different levels.

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