THE TELL-TALE FINGERPRINT

How Our Police Have Made New York the Center of the Fingerprint World

ARTHUR BIGELOW PAINE

THERE is nothing new about fingerprints. Hundreds and hundreds of years ago the Chinese required all suspected citizens to place their thumb and finger in printers' ink and leave the impressions with the police authorities for inspection and comparison. The Chinese crooks quickly discovered that the officials could never find their prints when they wanted them for purposes of comparison, so they laughed and chattered gaily while the Chinese bailiff rolled their fingers in the sticky ink. Two or three hundred years after the crooks had learned that the prints were of no earthly use, the officials discovered the same fact and, consequently, fingerprints were abandoned.

DOWN in a room at New York Police Headquarters, at 240 Centre Street, there are the fingerprints of 200,000 people. Some were taken in New York, and some were forwarded from Hong Kong, Bombay, Petrograd, Vienna, London, Paris, San Francisco, Melbourne, Tokio and Weehawken.

All of these 200,000 men and women are professional criminals. All over the world these people are collecting their toll in money or paying their price in time. Hundreds of other cities have sim'.lar Bureaus of Identification, and are constantly exchanging duplicates with the New York Detective Bureau, just as when you were a child you exchanged postage stamps and coins. What is 200,000 now will some day become a million. More than five thousand new ones are received every month.

Now supposing, as in China of old, all the fingerprints were kept topsy-turvy in bushel baskets. A man who had had his fingerprints taken in San Francisco and forwarded to the New York police in the year 1915, might appear in person at New York Headquarters in 1916 and again have his fingerprints taken. When asked if he had ever been arrested before or convicted of crime he would answer "No" in a second's time, knowing that it might take the New York police force a hundred years to find his fingerprints and contradict him. Fingerprints were of absolutely no police value until a ready system of cataloguing, classifying and indexing was devised. Such a system was devised in 1901 by Sir Edward Henry, of Scotland Yard.

In 1906 Joseph A. Faurot, then a lieutenant of police and now inspector in command of the New York Detective Bureau, went to Europe and studied the classification systems used in London and Paris. Returning to New York he made certain modifications, and the Henry System, as modified by Faurot, is now being used in all civilized parts of the world. By a system of exchanges Petrograd, London, Paris and New York have become the great clearing houses of criminal identification. Of these, New York is the greatest, and Inspector Faurot is recognized by all the police departments of the world as the present head and front of an aggressive police movement to obtain and centralize in one place all the fingerprints of all the professional criminals in the world.

THE reader will wonder what this discussion has to do with the talented and law abiding women whose fingerprints adorn these pages. There is no more connection between the written matter in this article and the illustrations than there is between Miss Irene Fenwick and the Manhattan Bank Robber, which took place before Miss Fenwick was born. The Editor probably wanted you to read this article. If he gave it to you "straight" he knew that you wouldn't read it, so he mixed in a few fingerprints of distinguished artists to make you read it, just as your mother used to drop a few raisins into your corn meal pudding to make you eat it.

Only the index fingers of the right hand are shown on this page, and always in an enlarged size.

To return to the corn meal. You will notice that each finger has numerous little ridges, some taking the form of arches, some loops, and some whirls. These arches or whirls or loops are counted. Another distinction taken into the count is the direction of the arches or the loops. If the Tines on the thumb and the first three fingers point toward the little finger, they are called one thing. If the lines on the four fingers point toward the thumb they are called another thing. Space will hot allow me to go into the various names by which certain finger lines and characteristics are lettered and numbered by the police. That would be very dry. Too much corn meal. It is one of those things you must take on faith. If a child knows his letters and how to supply a word, he can look up any word in the dictionary, and it makes no difference whether the dictionary contains a thousand words or a million words, the word can be found with equal ease and alYANSCI DOLLY most equal speed. If a child looks up the word "activity," he begins with the A's, and then the AC's, the ACT's, and so on till the end. If the police had occasion to look up Miss Pickford's fingerprints, they would begin with the 29/20's then the 29/20 1/0's and so on just as the child looks up a word.

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A MAN was brought into Headquarters the other day. He was charged with stealing a rare volume from the Public Library. He said he was innocent and had never been arrested before. He was fingerprinted. The prints were shot upstairs on a tray in a dumbwaiter. In four minutes time the dumbwaiter and the tray were back. On the tray was a type written yellow sheet, and on the sheet:

John B. Doe: 1902, Grand Larceny, sentenced at Youngstown, Ohio, to three years in States Prison; 1907, Grand Larceny, sentenced at Buffalo, New York, to two years in States Prison; 1912, Grand Larceny, sentenced at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to three years in States Prison.

When asked if he had been in Prison in the Cities mentioned, Doe replied, "They sent you my fingers. I will plead guilty. What's the use of giving money to my lawyers when my kids need all I've got."

NOW for some raisins. Two raisins; the Dolly twins. Supposing, by way of the most extravagant imagining, that one of the Dolly Sisters should cease toe-lifting and go into shop-lifting. Rozsika, we will say, is taking chances in New, York, while Yansci is dancing in London. Rozsika gets fingerprinted in New York and the prints are sent to London and tucked away in Scotland Yard, in a pigeonhole marked 10/8 11/9. Her photograph goe3 by the same steamer to the same place. While Rozsika is taking chances in Macy's or (perish the thought!) is receiving free country board against her will, Yansci, sisterless, is dancing at the Alhambra. It being a fine March afternoon, the condition of the London fog permits Miss Yansci to take a walk on Regent Street. Some pretty little diamonds lie in the shop-windows, Miss Yansci's hands lie in her muff, and Miss Rozsika's fingerprints rest comfortably in 10/6 at Scotland Yard. Things begin to happen. There is a cry of "Thief' and a shriek. A crowd and a bobby. A gray-haired woman, running swiftly through the fog, throws herself sobbing over Miss Yansci's shoulders. Miss Yansci, kind little soul, takes one friendly hand from one end of her muff just in time for the gray-haired lady to insert an unfriendly hand into the partially vacated muff. The crowd opens up for two Scotland Yard detectives. The gray-haired lady is searched, but without avail. A wad of white tissuepaper falls from Miss Yansci's muff to the pavement and is picked up by one of the men from Scotland Yard. Two little diamonds in the paper. Miss Yansci protests her innocence. Scotland Yard says, "We have your photograph," and presently Miss Yansci herself is taken through the gloomy portals of London's gloomiest place. Confronted with the photograph, she protests her innocence and says that over in America she has a twin sister who looks like that. The police answer, "Tell that to the Judge in the morning." Miss Yansci protests that she must go on at the Alhambra that night. The protests are not heeded, and her fingers are rolled in printers' ink in London just as Miss Rozsika's were rolled in New York. Mystified and amazed, Miss Yansci has nothing to do but call her manager on the telephone. Before she can say, "Are you there?" a detective comes in with a yellow slip and says, "You look like the photograph and the photograph looks like you, but I counted every arch, loop and whirl in your fingers and 1/6 R is not 10/6 U/A. I'm sorry, Miss, but I've got to let you go. Here's your prints for a souvenir."

Miss Yansci has nothing to do but cancel her call for her manager and substitute a call for her pressagent. The police have nothing to do but admire Miss Yansci and send out a general alarm for a gray-haired lady, age about 55, weight 130, height 5' 4", dressed in a black skirt and a gray shawl.

THE fingerprint is the mute but eloquent enemy of the criminal. According to Inspector Faurot it is the mute and eloquent friend of all the innocenti The fingerprint never changes from birth to death. Inspector Faurot thinks that everybody ought to be fingerprinted, servants, chauffeurs, bankers, lawyers, plumbers, milliners, babies—everybody. Perhaps he is right. The estimable artists who have furnished their fingerprints for this article may be the virtuous pioneers in a movement which will end in fingerprinting all mankind.

There is a known instance where a rich man, fearing the kidnapping of his child, has had two sets of fingerprints made and deposited in two safe deposit vaults. Similarly the fingerprint system would have solved many mysteries in connection with aphasia and loss of memory, where the affected persons become wanderers upon the face of the earth, unknown to the people and unknown to themselves. Similarly, in the many thousands of cases of unknown dead, with relatives striving in vain to secure the identification and bring their anxiety to a close, the fingerprint system, if universal, would act as a quick and infallible solution.

THE law of the fingerprint is as unchangeable as the law of gravity. Some day the ingenuity of mankind will make a maximum use of this law. When that day comes, babies will be washed up and dressed for fingerprinting just as they are today washed up and dressed for photographing, vaccination, christening and other kindred nuisances.