The man’s grainy photo looked as if it was straight out of a newspaper. He stared out unabashedly, a bowler hat set squarely atop his head.
His picture was in the center of a mugshot card along with his singular attributes, typed: height; weight; age; size of his trunk, left foot, right ear; head width and length, cheek length and hair color.
His crime: picking people’s pockets. The 32-year-old man had been picked up and arrested by the San Francisco Police Department for pickpocketing. A note on the plastic sheet enclosing the mugshot dated it to around 1900.
The back of the card described his “marks, scars and moles,” and was written in a shorthand that was hard to decipher:
Cic @ L.I.F to rear; Cic due to burn
4.5 x 3.5 @ 4.5 below L. elbow front;
Large cic due to burn 9. X 7.5 R. arm @ elbow inner.
Police mugshots as we know them were created in 1888 by a Paris police records clerk named Alphonse Bertillon. He took a mugshot of himself to the 1893 World Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. Soon after, police departments in the United States, Europe and Russia began using his invention as a way to catalog those arrested.
His mugshot template showed two photos side by side, a front view and side view. The lighting, angle and background were all the same in each photo.
Bertillon, also a researcher who grew up in a family of scientists, developed a system of identifying criminals and the accused by measuring various parts of the body, such as height, length of right ear, outstretched arms, right ear, left foot and other measurements. (Fingerprinting, DNA and other methods were later found to be more reliable.)
Police had been actually using such photos nearly four decades earlier, starting in the 1840s after the advent of photography. Police in Belgium and the United Kingdom were using them, and by the next decade so were police in the United States.
Departments compiled what was known as a “rogues’ gallery” of photos of both known criminals and the accused. The St. Louis Police Department is said to have formed the first. The department took those arrested to local photo studios to have their pictures taken, and the photos were displayed in the police station for the public to see. Other departments adopted the idea, including New York.
The Missouri History Museum in St. Louis, operated by the Missouri Historical Society, has some of the earliest mugshots in this country, dating from 1857 to 1867. They are full body shots of both men and women accused of such crimes as pickpocketing, robbery, theft and embezzlement. Others from the late 19th century can be found in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Mugshots were not only used to identify and catch criminals but as a way to typecast people, especially poor people and immigrants, “… people that society otherwise pretty much hated or feared,” as one collector and researcher of mugshots noted. African Americans were among those most often victimized.
Posting of mugshots today has taken a decidedly different turn. Some websites have sprouted that post them purely for a curious public. If you show up on one of them, you’ll be charged a fee to have your photo removed – sometimes with no guarantee of removal.
