Then and Now: Taking the measure of a criminal

Long before “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” there was (drum roll, please):

BAI: Bertillon Anthropometric Identification!

Well, maybe the title wouldn’t have been catchy enough for a TV show.

But the Los Angeles Police Department’s adoption of the Bertillon system in 1898 began a short, colorful chapter in the struggle to single out habitual lawbreakers.

Until then, a lack of accurate records prompted many judges to treat career bad guys as first-time offenders, leading to their early release.

Fingerprinting was still about a decade away and DNA analysis almost a century off.

French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon’s system measured dozens of parts of the body whose size couldn’t be altered — for instance, the lengths of the head, the forearm, the foot and the middle finger (yes, flashing a middle finger was once an official part of the processing of prisoners).

The length of the head, from the bottom of the chin to the crown, was broken into small, medium and large categories, with medium ranging from about 7.4 to 7.6 inches.

The files were cross-indexed according to measurements, along with name, sex, race, birthmarks and scars.

Other cities also adopted Bertillon and the data were shared, which proved useful, The Times noted in 1909, because “Eastern crooks migrate to Los Angeles every winter.”

“Anthropometrics” is the study of the human body’s measurements.

No such system was needed in more primitive times because criminals could be branded, tattooed or maimed for easy identification.

Or they could face a worse fate. Hanging, a common sentence in the British Empire, for example, canceled any chance of repeat offenses.

But with criminal justice reforms (and more lenient sentences) in the mid-19th century, it became necessary to keep accurate records on offenders.

Early attempts weren’t always effective.

In terms of evidence, an arrested person’s name “counts for little,” The Times pointed out a century ago. “He can change it every five minutes if he wants to. His age amounts to less, and his weight is almost worthless.”

Photographing — or “mugging” — suspects also had its limitations.

“Prisoners frequently try to disguise their height an inch or two [downward] by pushing out their stomach” or “stand on tiptoes” to add to their height, The Times said.

Then there was the occasional suspect who bedeviled police photographers by “distorting his features and making faces.”

One accused killer in New York had had his head shaved by the time police found him, and witnesses were unable to identify him.

So, The Times said, “it was necessary to keep him in jail until his hair grew out before he could be convicted.”

Of course, some disguises were less than ingenious.

A few novice lawbreakers donned glasses that had false colored eyes imprinted on the lenses, allowing a brown-eyed person to appear to have blue orbs.

Police pointed out that the fake specs were “evidence enough” of criminal behavior and “hard to get rid of once a man is in the hands of the police.”

In the 1890s, the LAPD’s Identification Bureau displayed “a rogues’ gallery” of local convicts at the old Central Police Station on 1st Street, “a motley array of pictures hung about on the walls or pasted on big sheets of cardboard in a glass cabinet.”

As the city — and its crime — grew the gallery was taken down for space reasons, and the photos were transferred to file cabinets.

Before Bertillon, no one knew the number of rogues who appeared in more than one photo under aliases.

But using the new system, the police were able to ascertain that they had three mug shots, all under different names, of a bunko artist known as Kid Reagan.

Reagan, not surprisingly, initially “denied he’d ever been ‘mugged’ before,” The Times said.

And police determined that a morphine addict who called himself George Murray, but also used the last names Mannheimer and Sherman, measured up in reality to be one Charles Cohen, an international “dip” (pickpocket). He was described as “a veritable Houdini with handcuffs and jail locks.” There’s no mention of whether he sneaked out of jail again to take on a new alias.

Although it had positive results, the Bertillon method involved a lot of paperwork. And there were questions about the ability of police officers to measure heads and other body parts.

In any event, the adoption of fingerprinting by Los Angeles police around 1910 led to the demise of Bertillon.

As the Baltimore Sun observed, going from “cumbersome anthropometry measurements to fingerprinting was sort of like going from a bulky box of vacuum tubes to a microchip. It was faster, more precise, with less room for error.”

And more bad news for the likes of Kid Reagan.

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