“Hey, Sarge, I’ve got a problem over here at the Tom Thumb store. Could you meet me here?” The call on the radio was from Bill Durkin, one of my patrolmen working plainclothes shoplifter duty on his day off at the upscale supermarket in west Plano, Texas. I was the on-duty sergeant on the west side. One of my other on-duty officers had responded to the store a few minutes earlier and left 10-95 two times (two arrests).
When I got to the store, I met Bill in the office. Through small one-way mirrors on a second level catwalk, he had been watching three men who entered the store and split up. They were wearing wide bell bottom pants. He observed each of the three take high dollar items and put them under the cuffs of their pants. When he stopped them as they were leaving the store, two of the men had items secreted in ace bandages wrapped around their calves. Those were the two 10-95’s the earlier officer had taken to jail.
But the third suspect had apparently become suspicious and ditched his merchandise. He still had the ace bandages around his ankles and calves, but there was nothing hidden in them. Bill’s problem was that the third guy had no ID, and the name & DOB he gave verbally came back empty – no DL, no arrests, no warrants, no proof of existence. Bill had detained him while he tried to ID the guy. Bill had radioed me to ask what he should do.
I walked over to the guy and asked to see his hands. He held them out, palm up. Since I knew Henry fingerprint classification, it was a simple matter to rap out a primary, secondary, and subsecondary just by looking at his fingertips for a few seconds.
I excused myself and went into another room, where I phoned Dallas Sheriff’s Department ID Unit. Luckily, Theresa Turko, a good friend, answered my call. “Hey, Theresa, I’ve got a Black male, around 50 years old, about 5’8”, maybe 150#.” I gave her the partial Henry class.
She took less than a minute. “That’s Willie Washington (not the real name). We’ve got warrants out for him. Hold him and we’ll pick him up in the morning.” She gave me his DOB and other ID information, too.
I returned to the other room. The guy had his back to me. “Hey, Willie!” I hollered.
He spun around, “Yeah, what?” Then realizing he’d answered to his real name, he added “How’d you know my name?”
“I’m a sergeant,” I said. “I’m magic.”
Bill got the rest of the story out of him after that. We didn’t charge him for shoplifting, obviously, but we did turn him over to DSO the next day. Bill asked me later how I learned his name so fast, but all I would tell him was what I told Willie. Sergeants are magic.
That’s how we did it before AFIS.