Alphonse Bertillon

Alphonse Bertillon was a French police officer who developed anthropometry-based criminal identification and systematized forensic photography and standardized mug shots.

Bertillon system: A criminal identification system that indexed people using body measurements, physical descriptions, and photographs. This was Bertillon’s operational method for identifying people already recorded by police.
Paris Police Prefecture: The principal police authority responsible for public order and policing in Paris. Bertillon developed and deployed his identification methods within its records office.
Fingerprints: Patterns of ridges on fingertips that can be used to distinguish individuals. Fingerprint identification eventually displaced Bertillon’s measurements as the leading method for police identification.
Dreyfus affair: A French political scandal beginning in 1894 over the wrongful conviction of Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus for treason. Bertillon gave controversial handwriting and measurement testimony during the affair’s contested evidence proceedings.
Anthropometry: The measurement of the human body, used in science, medicine, and identification systems. Bertillon adapted bodily measurement into the central classification method of his system.
Eugène Vidocq: A French criminal turned police investigator who led the Sûreté in early nineteenth-century Paris. Vidocq’s reliance on personal knowledge illustrates the identification problem Bertillon sought to systematize.
Francis Galton: An English polymath who studied heredity, statistics, and the individuality of fingerprints. Galton’s research helped establish the evidential basis for fingerprint identification that challenged Bertillonage.
Shepherd's Bush murders: The 1905 London murders of three members of the Kellow family, investigated with emerging forensic methods. The case brought Bertillon’s measurement and identification expertise into a high-profile British investigation.
Bertillon classification: A filing method that grouped anthropometric records by selected measurements, especially head and limb dimensions. It made Bertillon’s large collection of records searchable through measurements.
Sûreté: A French detective service that originated as a unit of the Paris police in the nineteenth century. It formed part of the policing tradition that preceded Bertillon’s bureaucratic identification system.

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