Leslie Ann Horvath, age 13, of Pittsburgh, Pa., for her question:
HOW DO POLICE IDENTIFY A PERSON, BY A FINGERPRINT?
Largest collection of fingerprints in the world is the file which has been developed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the United States Department of Justice. The Identification Division in Washington, D.C., has stored almost 200 million fingerprints. The use of fingerprint identification forms an inseparable part of law enforcement today.
Police in all parts of the world make extensive use of identifying people by their fingerprints. Fingerprinting is, as a matter of fact, the chief method of identifying a person with absolute certainty.
No two fingerprints have yet been found to be exactly alike. Fingerprints, therefore, are a foolproof means of identification. The ridges that form a fingerprint's pattern remain unchanged throughout a person's life.
Fingerprints are classified according to the types of patterns and the number of ridges that appear between designated points within the patterns. Police identify a person by checking out his type of pattern.
There are three main groups of fingerprint classification: the arch, the loop and the whorl. In the arch pattern, the ridges extend all the way across the bulb and rise slightly in the center or make a more definite tented rise. In the loop pattern, one or more ridges curve into a hairpin turn. Both ends of a loop ridge stop on the same side of the bulb. In the whorl pattern, the ridges follow a spiral or circular direction. There are eight subclassifications of the three main pattern types.
Fingerprinting is definitely associated with criminal investigation because of its wide use by law enforcement officers.
The Chinese used fingerprints to sign documents long before the birth of Christ. First to devise a workable method of fingerprint identification, however, was a British government official named Sir William Herschel who in about 1858 in India came up with a regular file system. Credit for founding the present system,of fingerprint identification goes to Sir Francis Galton who established in the 1880s a bureau for the registration of civilians by means of fingerprints and measurements..
Juan Vuccetich of Argentina in 9891 developed a method of classification of fingerprints that could be applied to criminal investigations. A simplified system for classifying and filing fingerprints, which is used by most bureaus of identification in North America today, was developed by Sir E.R. Henry in 1901. Sir Henry was the chief commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police.