The Crime Wave of 1920 and the Making of the Modern FBI

Before the dawn of the Twentieth Century, The Bertillon System was the standard for biometric identification.

In 1903 the New York state prison system had begun to use fingerprints. By 1908, all the branches of the U.S. military had adopted fingerprints. In 1924, an act of congress established the Identification Division of the FBI. The IACP's National Bureau of Criminal Identification and the US Justice Department's Bureau of Criminal Identification consolidated to form the nucleus of the FBI fingerprint files (source - and a very interesting site in its own right).

How did we get there? Read on.

The Wall Street Bombing That Made Hoover and the FBI (Bloomberg)

Shortly after noon on Thursday, Sept. 16, 1920, a powerful bomb hidden in a horse-drawn wagon exploded at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in Manhattan. It was a pleasant late-summer day, and throngs of people had been out enjoying a lunchtime stroll, a brief respite from the great money machine, the center of American capitalism.

Now blood ran in the streets where the first U.S. Congress had convened and the Bill of Rights became law. Shrapnel scarred the walls and shattered the windows of J.P. Morgan and Co., America’s most formidable bank. The bomb killed at least 38 people and injured roughly 400. It was the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history, a distinction it held for 75 years. Its force reverberates today.

In Washington at that hour, J. Edgar Hoover, 25 years old, was putting the finishing touches on the federal government’s first counterterrorist force, the General Intelligence Division. Hoover wrote that he intended to combat “not only the radical activities in the United States” but also those “of an international nature”; not only radical politics, but “economic and industrial disturbances” as well.

...

Walk to the corner of Wall and Broad Streets today, and you can run your hands over the deep gouges left by the 1920 bombing. You will have to look harder to see the cameras that track your steps -- a 21st-century tribute to Hoover, the architect of the modern surveillance state. Every fingerprint on file, every byte of biographic and biometric data in the computer banks of the government, owes its origins to him.

See also:
The Bertillon System: An Early ID Management System
The History of Fingerprints (and the Death of the Bertillon System)

The History of Fingerprints (and the Death of the Bertillon System)

Following up on the previous post on the Bertillon system, the Bertillon system was supplanted by fingerprints.

This page at onin.com has an excellent run-down of the history of the recognition (and use) of fingerprints as unique to each individual.

Remarkably, the assumption that fingerprints are, in fact, unique dates back to the dawn of history.

The linked page also has an account of the wild circumstances surrounding a famous mis-identification in 1903 that is credited with precipitating the demise of the Bertillon system as the primary identification system used for purposes of law enforcement.

The Bertillon System was generally accepted for thirty years. But it never recovered from the events of 1903, when a man named Will West was sentenced to the U.S. Penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas. It was discovered that there was already a prisoner at the penitentiary at the time, whose Bertillon measurements were nearly the same, and his name was William West.

Upon investigation, there were indeed two men who looked exactly alike. Their names were Will and William West respectively. Their Bertillon measurements were close enough to identify them as the same person. However, a fingerprint comparison quickly and correctly identified them as two different people. (Per prison records discovered later, the West men were apparently identical twin brothers and each had a record of correspondence with the same immediate family relatives.)

Criminal twin brothers with the same name killed the Bertillon system.

UPDATE:
Thanks to our Chief Technology Officer, Steven, we have found photos of the infamous West brothers on the web site of The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial.

Source: The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund; Photo

Here's a close-up of the picture above that fills in some detail:

The Bertillon System: An Early ID Management System

In a post the other day, I made a brief mention of the Bertillion system, also known as anthropometry, Bertillonage and the Bertillon system. "Bertillon system" seems to be the most common usage. Developed for use in criminal identification, the Bertillon System was an extremely important early attempt at using objective, measurable details of the human body for use in establishing an individual identity with a high degree of certainty.

Before 1882 establishing an individual's unique identity usually involved the testimony of trusted individuals. In a criminal trial, witnesses to a crime would swear that they did or didn't see the suspect commit a crime. Establishing a criminal history might rely upon a police officer under oath to establish the suspect's criminal record* [1].

With the invention of anthropometry, a system of body measurements of adult individuals for personal identification, Alphonse Bertillon, then working with the police in Paris, changed all that.

Divided into three integrated parts, Bertillon's anthropometrical system consisted of:

♦ Bodily measurements conducted with the utmost precision and under carefully prescribed conditions of a series of the most characteristic dimensions of bony parts of the human anatomy;

♦ The morphological description of the appearance and shape of the body and its measured parts as they related to movements "and even the most characteristic mental and moral qualities"; and

♦ A description of peculiar marks observed on the "surface of the body, resulting from disease, accident, deformity or artificial disfigurement, such as moles, warts, scars, tattooings, etc."[2]

Bertillon's system, which made the jump across the Atlantic in 1887, was greatly enhanced by advances in photography.

Here's a great example of a Bertillon record from Jersey City, New Jersey 1898 [3]

For a much larger view, Click here.

The Bertillon system was eventually abandoned world-wide because it failed to provide reliable and unique measurements, was too cumbersome to administer in a uniform manner and (unlike fingerprints) it didn't rely on a single measurement of any part of the body for identifying a specific individual.[2]

* Definitively establishing a criminal history that would merit harsher punishment than that meted out to first time offenders might (in certain times and places) also rely upon the highly effective, though irreversible, methods of dismemberment (cutting off the hands of thieves, etc.), branding, scarring and tattooing [1].

UPDATE: 
An observation: the measurements on the left half of the front of the record (the Bertillon measurements) appear to be in centimeters (metric system) while the height and weight on the right side are in standard units.

UPDATE II:
Something of a continuation of this post: The Death of the Bertillon system and the History of Fingerprints

Sources:
[1] Origins of the New York State Bureau of Identification by Michael Harling
[2] Alphonse Bertillon and Ear Prints by forensic-evidence.com
[3] Jersey City Police Department Bureau of Criminal Identification (B.C.I.), New Jersey, USA

See Also:
Alphonse Bertillon - Wikipedia.com