I was reflecting with my friend Deborah Smith a few days ago on my early training in #latentprints. In my case, it was 45 years ago. I was a patrol officer in Kerrville, Texas. I had already been processing #crimescenes 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.