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The First Mug Shots
A confluence of science and art
Hopefully, you’ve never had to pose for a mug shot.
It’s a standard part of modern law enforcement procedures — the police stand a person up against the wall, make them hold a board with their name, snap an eternal reminder of one of the worst days of their life, and then have them turn to the side and take another photo. It’s such a well-known procedure that it’s a trope in TV and movies.
But where did the mugshot come from? Its origins may surprise you.
The inventor of the mugshot, Alphonse Bertillon, was the black sheep of a prominent family of scientists who wandered into law enforcement. His methods were the beginning of what we might call scientific policing. And his innovations became a key tool for the French government in its messy battle against anarchist terrorism.
Alphonse Bertillon came from a prominent scientific family in France. His father, Louis-Adolphe, was a pioneering anthropologist and demographer. His older brother Jacques followed in Adolphe’s footsteps. But Alphonse’s life didn’t quite follow the family mold. He was expelled from school and bounced from one menial job to another before enlisting in the French Army. When he left the army, his father pulled some strings and got him a low-level record-keeping job with the Paris police in 1879.
Though he lacked his father and brother’s zeal for formal education, Alphonse did share their predilection for rationality and science. And he soon realized that nineteenth-century police work was anything but rational. Records weren’t carefully kept, and there seemed to be no system for keeping track of criminals. He realized that police did not have an orderly method to identify suspects, even those who had previously been arrested. Descriptions of criminals were often so maddeningly vague — tall, thin, dark hair, no beard — that they were no help to the police.
So Bertillon set off on a quest to rationalize French policing and, in the process, transformed law enforcement worldwide.
To improve the recordkeeping of the French police, Bertillon borrowed a technique from his anthropologist father — anthropometry. This process of measuring various parts of the human body and making conclusions from them…
