Although mug shots were helpful in aiding police with criminal identification, alone they could not definitely prove someone’s identity. 

At the end of the 19th century, two important systems of identification emerged which law enforcers hoped would be capable of proving identity beyond a shadow of a doubt: fingerprinting and the Bertillon method. These techniques not only had a profound effect on the future of criminal identification, but also influenced the history of mug shots.

Of course these were not the only methods of criminal identification that were explored during the 19th century. Click on the links below to explore some of the techniques beyond mug shots that were experimented with:

Alphonse Bertillon devised a system of criminal identification based on precise measurements of the human body using specially designed calipers.

Bertillon Method

Using fingerprints to identify criminals is still an important tool that police use today, and it was the system chosen by New Zealand Police in the early 20th century. However, for many years, a lot of law enforcers thought that the Bertillon method - also known as anthropometry - would prevail as the ultimate method of criminal identification for police. Although it was never adopted in New Zealand, it had an important influence on mug shots all over the world.

Alphonse Bertillon started his career as a clerk in the Paris Police. Here, appalled by the state of record-keeping and the lack of reliable criminal identification systems, he developed a system he hoped would solve both problems in 1879. Bertillon’s solution was a series of anthropometric measurements of unalterable parts of the body using specially designed callipers, gauges and rulers. Prisoners underwent eleven precise measurements:

• height
• head length
• head breadth
• arm span
• sitting height
• left middle finger length
• left little finger length
• left foot length
• right ear length
• cheek width

These measurements were organised into a complex indexing system using specially trained clerks. When trying to identify someone, these clerks would navigate through the filing system by searching smaller and smaller sub-categories of the measurements, and produce ‘anthropometric cards’ of all the people who matched the measurements. Because the odds of two people having exactly the same eleven measurements were low, process of elimination based on facial description could be applied to the small number of possible people.

At first, Bertillon insisted that these descriptive cards contain only precise, detailed descriptions of criminals using standardised terms which he called a portrait parlé. Bertillon was not impressed by the supposed objectivity of the photographs, and sought to replace the mug shot with a systematised language as the medium of police communication and surveillance.

He soon realised the impossibility of his task, however, and reluctantly decided to start using mug shots to supplement his system. He insisted that mug shots be taken in a standardised, scientific manner by police, which suited the preciseness of the rest of his system and reflected a professional, objective police point of view. Bertillon also believed that ears might someday be used as a unique identification point much like fingerprints, and insisted that a second mug shot be taken in profile as well.

Although Bertillon’s system was more popular than fingerprinting in Europe at the end of the 19th century, it was too complicated and unreliable to be sustained. Eventually it was completely replaced by fingerprinting all over the world. However, Bertillon’s influence on the mug shot gave it the distinctive look we are familiar with today. Mug shots everywhere began to be taken according to his specifications, including New Zealand, who started taking standardised mug shots facing front and in profile in 1904.

Fingerprinting

Rajyadhar Konai’s hand print, from the back of a contract with W J Herschel for 2000 maunds (165, 200 lbs) of road metalling. Dated 28 July 1858.

Fingerprints have been used as signature since ancient times. In ancient Babylon, for example, fingerprints were used on clay tablets for business transactions, and in ancient China thumb prints have been found on clay seals. It is unknown, however, whether or not these civilisations recognised the unique characteristics of fingerprints.

Their use as a modern system of identification developed in the British colony in India, by Sir William Herschel, a Chief Magistrate in Jungipoor. Playing on local superstitions that personal contact with a document made it more binding, he began to require palm or fingerprints on business contracts made with local Indian workers.

As Herschel’s system grew, he realized that a person’s fingerprints did not change with age. He felt that fingerprints would be a good solution to the problems with identification.

A decade later, Dr Henry Faulds took up the serious study of the individual characteristics of fingerprints, and devised the first formal system of classifying them.

Sir William Herschel’s fingerprints, taken over a 50 year period.

His original nine types of fingerprints were reduced and simplified by Sir Francis Galton a short time later into the three major patterns used for classification today: loops, arches, and whorls.

Galton assigned a letter to each type of fingerprint pattern: A for arch, W for whorl, I for inner loops that opened towards the thumb and O for outer loops which opened toward the pinky finger. Galton would assign a letter to each finger based on the fingerprint pattern, so a ten letter code was created for each person. (Take a look at your fingertips - what would your code be?) These ten-letter patterns could be arranged and searched alphabetically. That way, even if someone gave a false name, police would only have to search through mug shots corresponding to that fingerprint combination.

Sir Francis Galton, photographed at Alphonse Bertillon’s laboratory in 1893. From “The Life, Letters, and Labors of Francis Galton”, by Karl Pearson. Vol 2, Ch. 13, Plate Lll, 382-3.

In 1903, Walter Dinnie, former Chief Inspector of the London Metropolitan Police, was named Police Commissioner of New Zealand. He had extensive training in colonial policing and forensic technology, and was responsible for the development of fingerprinting in New Zealand. He sought to professionalise and modernise the New Zealand Police Force, and insisted that fingerprints of every arrested criminal be taken along with their criminal history, and forwarded to the Fingerprint Bureau in Wellington. By 30 June 1903, the Bureau had already received 498 sets.

Supplemented with mug shots and detailed identification records, in just a few of years New Zealand Police became internationally renowned for its impressively successful criminal identification system. In fact, in May 1905, New Zealand boasted the first ever criminal conviction based on fingerprint evidence alone: John Clancy was convicted of breaking and entering in Wellington on the strength of a single finger impression left on a broken piece of window glass.
This fingerprint matched his fingerprints, which had been recorded at the Auckland gaol a few months earlier.

Other Methods

Although the combination of mug shots and fingerprinting proved to be the most successful combination for criminal identification in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, other less successful methods were explored as well.

For example:

• In the first decade of the 1900s, a Parisian doctor suggested branding criminals by using a harmless injection of paraffin wax to create a small bump. He suggested the placement could be encoded according to the seriousness of the crime, such as upper/middle/lower right shoulder according to varying degree of dangerousness.
• The radiographic laboratory in the Saltpetriere Hospital in France collected 8000 negatives of fractures and other internal anomaly shortly after the invention of X-ray technology in 1895, with the thought that they could be used for criminal identification. Before the dangers of radiation associated with X-rays were fully known, it was suggested that all arrested suspects have an X-ray taken, much like a mug shot.
• In 1827 the British Registry of Distinctive Marks was established. This system attempted to organise criminal records according to the pecularities of their body, such as tattoos, freckles, scars, birthmarks, or missing appendages. The filing system was divided up according to the part of body the distinctive mark was located (head and face; throat and neck; chest, belly and groin; back and loins; hands and fingers; thighs and legs; and feet and ankles), and then subdivided by the type of mark. The distinctive marks were then further divided by descriptions of the mark, such as the type of tattoo or size of the blemish. That way, if an arrested suspect gave a false name, the police could reduce the number of possible identities by only looking at files of people with similar distinctive marks. However, the flaws in this system lay in the fact that many people have more than one distinctive mark, and that there is an infinite number of ways to sub-categorise descriptions of marks, tattoos, and disfigurements. Although distinctive marks remained part of the general description in criminal police records, the idea of the British Registry of Distinctive Marks was eventually abandoned. 

Although these men were never part of the official Registry of Distinctive Marks, each display a sort of distinctive mark which the Registry tried to document.

Although mug shots alone failed to provide a reliable system of criminal identification in the 19th century, some tried to find alternative uses of mug shot photography. 

One of the most salient examples of this was the 'science' of physiognomy. Physiognomy is the study of a person's physical characteristics - especially their face - to try and determine things about their personality. Although it was widely discredited during the 20th century, during the 18th and 19th centuries it was a legitimate and respected science. Many hoped that this study of faces could be used to pinpoint a 'criminal look' which could help police identify criminals - perhaps even before they committed a crime.

Physiognomy also had a direct link to the development and use of mug shots in the late 19th century. Sir Frances Galton (1822-1911), who is best known for his innovations in the science of fingerprinting, studied the potential of mug shots to reveal the ‘look’ of criminality. He layered mug shots of certain ‘types’ of criminals (such as smugglers, thieves, arsonists, etc.) into composite photographs. He hoped that by combining their faces, he would be able to identify facial features that indicated criminal tendencies.

Galton was the first to use mug shots in this way, but he wasn't the first to study the face to try and identify the 'criminal look'. For example, Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741-1801) was a Swiss poet and physiognomist who published Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beforderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe in 1775-78. In this popular book, he claimed that a person's facial characteristics reflected their 'temperament' or character (see image below).

Building on this idea, 19th century criminologists like Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909) even identified some specific characteristics which might indicate criminal tendencies, such as:

• 'sugar loaf' shaped skulls
• pointy heads
• heavy jaws
• receding brows
• scanty beards

Lombroso claimed that criminality was inherited, and those who were 'born criminal' could be identified by these sorts of physical defects. Although it may seem like a laughable concept today, physiognomists thought that one day we would be able to look at a photograph of a person and be able to tell if they were a criminal, and even what types of crime they were capable of.

This idea that someone's physical look reflected their inner character and personality traits evolved out of another popular pseudo-science of the 18th and 19th centuries: phrenology. Phrenology is the study of the shape of the skull, based on the belief that its bumps correlate to parts of the brain. Phrenologists studied the faces and heads of people in order to try and reveal their behaviours and personality traits

In New Zealand, phrenologists even occasionally attended the executions of criminals in order to make plaster death masks. By studying the facial characteristics and skulls of these masks, experts hoped it would reveal insight into their criminal tendencies. For example, death masks of the notorious Burgess gang - Richard Burgess, Thomas Kelly and William Levy - were taken by a phrenologist named A. S. Hamilton at their executions in Nelson on 5 October 1866. Hamilton was allowed to study the men in prison before they were hanged, and to attend the executions.
Burgess was even interested in this process, requesting that the death mask be taken before his execution, in case his face was distorted after death.

Although the use of photography for criminal identification seemed so promising in the beginning, police all around the world soon realized that it had severe limitations. At the end of the nineteenth century mug shots were criticised for a number of reasons.

First of all, some people were concerned that mug shots and their association with criminality would taint the art and aesthetics of respectable portraiture. Because police often relied on commercial photographers to take mug shots of arrested criminals, it was sometimes hard to tell the difference between a mug shot and a normal portrait (see image below). Those who could afford the expensive portraits worried that they might be mistaken for criminals. Furthermore, many worried that by using it for 'common purposes' like criminal portraits would rob photography of its 'art'.

Secondly, mug shots were criticized for their 'unscientific' process. Mug shots still relied on the subjective visual recognition of a criminal. Although this was certainly an improvement over written descriptions of suspects, many still desired a more reliable system which could identify criminals beyond the shadow of a doubt. To read about some of the methods that police developed to try and achieve this, see Beyond Mug Shots: Other Methods of Criminal Identification.

Finally, one of the biggest problems with mug shots lay in how to classify, organise, and sort through photographs. If the mug shots were organised by name and sorted into alphabetical order, it would be difficult to find the correct photograph if a suspect gave police a false name. Police and witnesses had to resort to flipping through mug shot books - a slow process which rarely resulted in a positive identification. By 1913, there were already over three thousand mug shots in New Zealand - a nearly impossible number of photographs to sort through. But this was nothing compared to larger places like London, where forty-three thousand mug shots were already collected by 1876.

Although mug shots have proved to be an invaluable tool for police in New Zealand and throughout the world, they were not the final solution to criminal identification that many had once hoped. New methods had to continue to be explored and incorporated into police work throughout the 20th century.

The New Zealand Police Force was officially established on 1 September 1886, and they began collecting photographs of prisoners that same year. 

These first photographs look a little different from modern mug shots. This is largely because there were no officially trained police photographers in New Zealand at the time. Instead, police relied on commercial photographers and amateur camera enthusiasts to take the mug shots. Because of this, the style of early mug shots in the collection of the New Zealand Police Museum vary greatly from photograph to photograph.

One common element in many mug shots, however, is the display of prisoners’ hands. In 1886, the introduction of fingerprinting in New Zealand was still nearly two decades away, so the inclusion of hands in mug shots provided an additional point of identification for police. Missing fingers, scars, and the general shape and condition of the prisoners' hands could all help in the identification of a suspect.

In 1903, Police Commissioner Walter Dinnie organised a comprehensive system of criminal registration for the New Zealand Police, in an attempt to modernise and professionalise policing in the country. His new system required photographs, handwriting samples, reports, associates, and operating habits to be collected from every criminal arrested in New Zealand. His son E. W. Dinnie, who had been trained in the United Kingdom in these modern methods of criminal identification, was named Finger-print Expert and Photographer. Throughout 1904, the young Dinnie worked closely with the New Zealand prison administration to refine the record keeping system, particularly the photographic files. This resulted in new, more elaborate criminal identification forms, which included a place for fingerprinting details.

From 1904 it became a standard police responsibility to take mug shots of all prisoners. A list of New Zealand policemen who owned cameras and/or were acquainted with photography was drawn up. In areas where there were no policemen available for taking mug shots, commercial photographers were still relied upon. The Policemen-photographers were paid for each photograph, or compensated by being exempted from night duty.

In April 1904, the Police Gazette (a monthly bulletin circulated to all police in New Zealand) also published its first mug shot- a photograph of wanted criminal John McKenzie, a convicted rapist who was wanted for the murder of his former employer.

In 1912 the Prisons Amendment Act officially sanctioned the use of mug shots, by declaring that all accused or convicted prisoners incarcerated for the first time had to submit to being photographed and fingerprinted, including by use of ‘reasonable force’ if necessary. By 1913 it was reported that over a thousand photographs of prisoners had been taken at Police Headquarters in Wellington, and approximately two thousand had been taken elsewhere in New Zealand.