As fingerprint use became routine, agencies began building large-scale fingerprint databases to store and search prints. The first official fingerprint bureau in the world was set up in 1897 in Calcutta, India. There, all criminal fingerprint records were systematically classified according to Sir Edward Henry’s formula, and the bureau proved the feasibility of maintaining a central repository. Over the next few years, several colonial outposts (such as in Bengal and Bihar provinces) and other countries created similar bureaus.
In 1901, Britain’s Metropolitan Police established its Fingerprint Bureau in London, which started the centralized collection of fingerprints of arrested persons across England. The New York City Police Department opened the first American municipal fingerprint bureau in 1902, and in 1903 the New York State Prison System became the first in the U.S. to systematically fingerprint all prisoners. Also in 1903, Leavenworth Federal Prison began fingerprinting inmates (initially in parallel with Bertillon measurements). By 1904, Leavenworth’s warden, Major R.W. McClaughry, had introduced fingerprinting at the national level: fingerprint cards from federal prisoners were collected, marking the beginning of the U.S. Government’s fingerprint collection.
These early collections were relatively small, but they grew rapidly as more agencies adopted the practice.
To improve coordination, the International Association for Criminal Identification was founded in 1915 (renamed the International Association for Identification, IAI, in 1918) – this professional body helped standardize methods and facilitated sharing of fingerprint records among jurisdictions. In 1923, the U.S. International Association of Chiefs of Police established a Bureau of Criminal Identification in Washington, D.C., which served as a national clearinghouse for fingerprint cards submitted by local police departments.
The culmination came in 1924, when an Act of Congress in the United States merged the major fingerprint collections into a single repository under the FBI’s new Identification Division. The fingerprint files of the Justice Department’s Bureau of Criminal Identification, the National Police Chiefs’ repository, and Leavenworth Prison were all consolidated, creating an FBI database of some 810,000 fingerprint cards as a start. This event formalized the first national fingerprint database in the U.S. (and one of the first worldwide) under government control.
By the 1930s, the FBI’s Identification Division was receiving thousands of fingerprint cards daily and expanding into the millions of records. Similarly, other nations centralized their fingerprint files: e.g., England’s Fingerprint Bureau expanded nationally, Argentina’s police forces shared Vucetich’s files, and by mid-century almost every country had a national fingerprint archive for criminals, civil service applicants, or both.
These national databases greatly enhanced criminal identification. Repeat offenders could be identified by fingerprints even under false names, and fingerprints from crime scenes could be searched against nationwide files. Over time, civil fingerprint records (for government employment, driver’s licenses, immigration, etc.) were also included, further enlarging databases. By the late 20th century, the largest repositories (like the FBI’s) held tens of millions of prints, necessitating new technology to search them efficiently – which led to the era of automation.
Sources:
The Fingerprint Sourcebook (NIJ)History of Fingerprints – ONIN
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