I was reflecting with my friend Deborah Smith a few days ago on my early training in latent prints. In my case, it was 45 years ago. I was a patrol officer in Kerrville, Texas. I had already been processing crime scenes for four years when the assistant chief, Bill Beasley, caught me in the parking lot after work one day and asked if I would like to go to school at Texas DPS Academy to learn fingerprints. When I returned, he said, I would be Kerrville’s first Fingerprint Officer. I would have the rank of Detective and get bumped up to sergeant’s pay. Bill and the Chief, Scotty Evans, had picked me because out of 25 officers on the force, I was the only one with a BS degree. Of course, I said “Yes!”
I was eager to expand my skills and took full advantage of the opportunity. Texas DPS Academy had a dormitory, a cafeteria, and classrooms reminiscent of any college campus, only on a smaller scale. The “I.D. Officers School” was two weeks of latent print processing, Henry classification, searching and filing by Henry, and fingerprint comparisons. It was, for its time, “all you need to know about fingerprints.”
The lead instructor was Gaston McDonald. His two aides were Danny Carter and Claude Stephens. Claude later went to the Potter County Sheriff’s Office in Amarillo, Texas.
I still remember Gaston drilling the students on Henry classification. It must have taken, because I can still classify with only occasional reference to the little cheat card they handed out. The line Gaston repeated hundreds of times during training was “Don’t ask me why. If you ask me why, the answer will always be ‘Because I said so.’ ” And, indeed, that was Gaston’s method of training. We learned the rules and the dogma without any explanation as to the reasons behind them.
Once we had learned to classify, we each were given a test stack of ten inked fingerprint cards to classify and search through the state’s Henry files. As I recall, there were about 3 million cards in the files at that time. If the subject was in the files, we had to find the card and copy the State ID number on our card. If the subject was not in the files, we had to note that on our tenprint card.
The main thing I remember about the latent print comparison training in that first class at DPS Academy was the “latent” prints on lift cards. That was back in the days before photocopier or “Xerox” machines were in common use. Gaston and his aides had cut small pieces of inked prints out of surplus inked print cards and taped them onto latent print lift cards. We pretended they were latent print lifts. These “latents” and the inked prints we compared them to were surplus cards from the files of arrestees who had multiple arrests. At the time, a person’s first arrest went into the Henry files. Subsequent arrests went into file folders by last name alphabetically. It was the subsequent arrest cards that got cut up into tiny pieces and used for latent print training.
In those early days, the only formal classes available to me in Texas were the Texas DPS Academy courses and the FBI courses. In Kerrville where I worked, on the job (OJT) training was non-existent. The IAI did not teach classes. There were no published training standards. SWGFAST was still almost 20 years in the future. There was no laboratory accreditation. There were annual #IAI and Division conferences did not have breakout sessions or workshops, but there were always lectures of interest and, more importantly, wonderful networking opportunities and senior latent print examiners eager to answer a rookie’s questions.
When I took the position of supervisor over the ID Unit at Plano PD in 1986, I began taking inked prints and latents from other employees and putting together training exercises to train my ID Technicians. I wanted to give them something more than I had in the way of training. I put together a week-long series of comparison exercises, starting with easy full pattern comparisons and ending with latents having minimal features and no focal points. I had no “train the trainer” instruction, only my instincts. I made a short, rough outline of topics I thought were important. My first class was in 1987. I had a total five students from Plano, Garland, and Richardson PDs.
Word spread and I began teaching outside my own department. The North Central Texas Regional Police Academy asked me to teach the class there in 1988. I continued teaching there for several years. One of the people I had met at IAI, Ann Punter, asked me to teach my class at Ontario, CA PD for her employees in 1992 and other PDs in California followed. When the IAI Board created a training division, Jim Murray was the first coordinator and I was the first IAI instructor. My first class in that role was in Conyers, GA in 1996.
I have refined that original class through almost 90 sessions in the US, Europe, and Australia/New Zealand. I continue to teach a much-evolved version of it for the IAI through their training arm, TriTech Forensics. Other latent print training, such as the FBI Academy used to teach, has declined, but dozens of other instructors have started teaching, both for TriTech Forensics (over 100 classes offered this year!), for other forensic training organizations, and on their own.
The concept of forensic science is transitioning from the Popperian ideas of my early days to the Bayesian approach being developed today. The class, as I teach it now, includes a look backwards at the historical perspectives of Sir Francis Galton, Edmund Locard, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, and Carl Hempel. Deborah Smith and I sometime co-teach, and she teaches a latent print comparison class with emphasis on quality measures and SOPs to meet accreditation standards. The field has come a long way since I first got into it and the training opportunities are much richer and more varied.