Scotland Y
t
to its mould.
James Marsh creates a test able to detect tiny amounts of arsenic
.The Medical Witness Act allows British coroners to conduct autopsies into suspicious deaths.
Henry Inman establishes the South Australia Police.
The first American police force is established in Boston.
Mathieu Orfila’s poison test provides the evidence to convict Marie Lafarge
. The earliest prisoner photographs are taken in Belgium.
to
8
Criminologists and historians of crime have long agreed that there was a long-term overall decline in homicide between the medieval and the modern age. Researchers attempting to plot this decline have suggested that the growth of nation states and the development of a capitalist economy both contributed. As a society, we gradually became more ‘civilized’ and thus, so the thesis suggests, less likely to resort to violence. Conversely, as we became less physically violent as a society, we grew more fascinated by the violence carried out by the minority. Popular culture sated that interest by offering up images of sadistic killers as examples of the dark side of human nature and presented murderers as representatives of the ‘other’ at large in modern society.
Above. images from charles le brun’s a series of lithographic drawings illustrative of the relationship between the human physiognomy and that of the brute creation (1671, trans. 1827). le brun’s illustrations accompanied a lecture in which he outlined the principles of physiognomy and its stated ability to attribute personality traits to physical facial characteristics. it gave rise to the notion that if your face resembled an animal’s, then your personality
might also be similar.
Much of the interest in murder and violent crime was concentrated in the cities of the world. As the Industrial Revolution gained pace during the 19th century, people left the countryside for the crowded metropolises. Such areas became melting pots of multi-culturalism: places where fortunes were made and lost, and where new ideas were formed. Crucially, though, they also became places of social danger, associated with crime, immorality and disease. Anonymity and alienation contributed to the idea that crime and criminals were endemic. By contrast, rural areas were seen to offer an escape to a simpler, safer and more idyllic past. In fact, murders continued to occur in country areas; indeed, the more remote the area, the less likely it was that a murder would be reported, the crime solved and the killer prosecuted. In the cities, sophisticated policing systems developed alongside scientific and technological advances, increasing the detection and prosecution rates there, and forcing murderers to be ever more cunning and resourceful to avoid capture and imprisonment.
Professional policing was still a relatively new innovation in the middle of the 1800s. London’s Metropolitan Police Service was only
D.
C.
B.
A.
Horse-drawn prison wagons known as Black Marias are introduced to the London Met.
Chemist Jean Stas githat convicts Count Hippolyte
ves evidence Visart de Bocarmé of murder. Allan Pinkerton establishes his own private detective agency.
Ludwig Teichmann develops a test to determine the presence of blood in a stain. Louis François Étienne B
ergeret establishes time of death using forensic entomolo. Jean Louis L
assaigne publishes the results of his systematic microscopic studies of hair. The New York City Police
Department establishes a ‘rogues’ gallery’ of photographic records wn criminals.
velop a spectroscopic method of identifying unknown materials.
of kno Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchhoff de
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pig-faced man.
pig for comparison.
fox-faced man.
fox for comparison.
INTRODUCTION.
9
founded in 1829, New York’s in 1845, and, although the Paris ‘police’ had existed since the French Revolution, the police force there did not create a ‘detective’ branch until the 1830s. France undoubtedly led the way in detection techniques, establishing the first private detective agency at the beginning of the century, led by Eugène-François Vidocq (1775–1857), a former convict and police informer. Vidocq was appointed head of the Bureau de Sûreté in Paris and given the brief to detect crime and catch criminals. In the early years of detection, the idea that it ‘took a thief to catch a thief’ was dominant, and Vidocq was supported by a squad of ex-convicts and mouchards (police informants). This approach persisted until the 1870s when the importance of scientific detection gradually began to be appreciated. London’s Detective Department was created
in 1842, following some high-profile failures to solve serious crimes and fears over the growing number of attempts to kill Queen Victoria. The Criminal Investigation Department (CID) – the nerve centre of all detection in modern Britain – was not instituted until 1878 (and only then in the wake of a scandal that had implicated several members of the Detective Department in a betting scam). The city of Boston formed the first US detective agency in 1846, with other US cities following its lead.
The credit for the development of modern forensics must be given to a number of men working in the last quarter of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th, but one man, Alphonse Bertillon (1853–1914), was the undisputed father of the science. As policing developed, it was quickly recognized that identity was the key to solving crime. The problem was that record keeping was patchy at best and so criminals could evade capture simply by changing their
