Alphonse Bertillon Essay

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Leadership: Alphonse Bertillon "Every measurement slowly reveals the workings of the criminal. Careful observation and patience will reveal the truth." —Alphonse Bertillon, French criminologist At different periods in history, man has tried a variety of methods whereby one can be identified separately from his peers. Eyewitness descriptions were relied on but features which we can recognize one by are subjected to change either accidentally or deliberately. Tattoos which can be duplicated and or distorted were also once heavily relied on. Photographs were also used in identification of persons with heavy objection to the angles at which they were taken, changes due to age, condition of health, accident, mutilation and lack of color as they were mostly black and white copies. (a Study of Finger Prints, Their uses and Classification. 32 edition. Pgs 15-17) Alphonse Bertillon, (born April 23, 1853, Paris—died Feb. 13, 1914, Münsterlingen, Switz.). He was the son of medical professor Louis Bertillon and the younger brother of the statistician and demographer Jacques Bertillon. He was a criminologist and anthropologist who created the first system of physical measurements, photography, and record-keeping that police could use to identify recidivist criminals. Bertillon began his career as a records clerk in the Parisian police department. His obsessive love of order led him to reject the unsystematic methods used to identify suspects and motivated him to develop his own method, which combined systematic measurement and photography. In 1883, the Parisian police adopted his anthropometric system, called signaletics or bertillonage. (http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/62832/Bertillon-system) Surveying the suspect's body Bertillon identified individuals by measurements of the head and body, shape formations of the ear, eyebrow, mouth, eye, etc., individual

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