The ‘war to end all wars’ was over, but a new conflict had erupted on the streets of America. In its early days this war was heavily one-sided, as the police struggled to adapt their methods to the scourge of gang violence.
Its belligerents were the rising tide of a professional criminal class, who had been enriched and emboldened by Prohibition, which in 1920 had made the USA into a dry nation. In the great city of Chicago, it was estimated that some 1300 gangs spread like a deadly virus over the course of the decade. There was no easy solution to this problem: with wallets full to bursting from the profits of bootlegging, the gangs armed with their Tommy guns operated with impunity, paying off politicians and the police. Rival gangs, led by the ruthless Al ‘Scarface’ Capone and hot-headed George ‘Bugs’ Moran, had transformed the city into a battleground. Over 12,000 murders were committed each year in America. On the other side, the police were overrun and powerless against the wave of criminality that was washing over the nation. The fight against bootlegging and speakeasies was already a hefty challenge, but the wild years would also see bank robberies, kidnappings, car thefts, gambling and narcotics all becoming more commonplace crimes. Most often, local police forces had neither the weapons nor the training to keep up – and their jurisdiction ended abruptly at state or city lines.
And so, the arrival of the fingerprinting era was a welcome turning point for lawmen.
Although it is now commonplace, the use of fingerprints to identify criminals was only in its infancy in the early twentieth century. The Bertillon system, which recorded criminals’ facial and bodily characteristics in minute detail, listing a series of precise figures on a large card accompanied by a photograph, was the more popular method at the time. After all, the rationale went, what were the chances that two different people who looked alike and had identical measurements would both end up committing a crime? Very slim, the Bertillon method contended.
But inevitably, one case was presented that would frustrate this process. It occurred in 1903, when a convict named Will West was being brought to Leavenworth federal prison in Kansas. The man working at the admissions desk thought he recognised West, and asked the convict if he had already been to Leavenworth. The new prisoner insisted he had not. The employee took West’s Bertillon measurements and referred to his files, and pulled out a card for “William” West. Sure enough, Will and William looked strangely alike. Their Bertillon measurements were almost identical. The guard asked Will once again if he had ever been incarcerated at the prison. “Never,” the man insisted. Turning over the card, the guard saw that Will was telling the truth – William was already in Leavenworth, where he was serving a life sentence for murder. Shortly afterwards, the two men’s fingerprints were compared and shown to be clearly different. This incident would be a death knell for the Bertillon system. The following year, Leavenworth abandoned the method and began keeping fingerprint records of its detainees.
And so, the first federal fingerprint database was born.
Alan Alfredo Geday