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( Alphonse Bertillon)
Alphonse Bertillon (April 23, 1853—February 13, 1914) was a French law enforcement officer and biometrics researcher who created anthropometry, an identification system based on physical measurements. Anthropometry was the first scientific system police used to identify criminals. Until this time, criminals could only be identified based on eyewitness accounts, which are known to be unreliable. The method was eventually supplanted by fingerprinting,[1] but "his other contributions like the mug shot and the systematisation of crime-scene photography remain in place to this day."[2] Alphonse Bertillon was born April 23, 1853 in Paris. He was a son of statistician Louis Bertillon and younger brother of the statistician and demographer Jacques Bertillon. Bertillon began as a records clerk in a police department. Paradoxically he got this job as a protegé of his prominent father. Being an orderly man, he was dissatisfied with the ad hoc methods used to identify captured criminals who had been arrested before. This motivated his invention of anthropometrics. Bertillon's road to fame was a protracted and hard one as he was forced to do his measurements in his spare-time. He used the famous La Santé Prison in Paris for his activities facing jeers from the prison inmates as well as police officers. In 1882 Bertillon presented a criminal identification system known as anthropometry but later also known as Bertillonage in honor of its creator. In this system the person was identified by body measurement of the head and body, individual markings - tattoos, scars - and personality characteristics. The measurements were made into a formula that would apply only on one person and would not change. He used it in 1884 to identify 241 multiple offenders, and the system was quickly adopted widely by American and British police forces. Part of its benefit was that by arranging the records carefully, it would be very easy to sift through a large number of records quickly given a few measurements from the person to be identified. While it might not always give an exact match, it would allow one to narrow the pool of possible people and then to compare the person with a photograph.
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