To avoid ID, more are mutilating fingerprints; police say scarring can thwart detection
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| A surgically altered finger is seen in a photo from the State Police. |
By David
Abel | GLOBE STAFF | July 21, 2010
So desperate was
one man to conceal his identity that he began biting his fingers and drawing
blood while being booked.
Some have used
eyedroppers filled with acid or pressed their fingers onto burning metal to
blot their fingerprints. Others have spent thousands of dollars to hire shady
doctors to surgically alter their fingertips, hoping to scar them beyond
recognition.
The numbers are
still relatively small, but in the past decade, State Police detectives say
they have seen a sevenfold spike in people arrested with mutilated fingertips,
a disturbing trend they said reflects dire efforts to evade the harsher
punishments that come with multiple arrests, to avoid deportation, or to fool
the increasingly sophisticated computers that do most fingerprint checks.
Since 2002, when
State Police started to keep count of suspects with deliberately scarred
fingerprints, they have recorded 72 arrests, 20 of which occurred last year.
There were just three when they began keeping records.
``It's definitely
an increasing phenomenon,'' said Detective Lieutenant Kenneth Martin,
commanding officer of the State Police division that oversees fingerprint
analysis of crime scenes. ``We've seen it all: self-inflicted mutilation,
surgical efforts to cut out the core of fingers, and having the skin stitched
back in strange ways.''
In the last month,
federal and local officers in the area have made multiple arrests in three
separate cases involving people who sought to hide their identity by trying to
erase their fingerprints.
While authorities
have had some recent successes in identifying those with mutilated
fingerprints, most have not been identified. Indeed, of the recorded arrests
this decade in Massachusetts, only 17 percent were positively identified by matching
their scuffed fingerprints with previously recorded prints.
Moreover,
detectives suspect they are missing many others who may have been recorded as
new fingerprints by the state's computer system, which receives on average
about 700 fingerprint cards a day from some 360 law enforcement agencies around
the state.
The 24-year-old
State Police computer system, which determines whether a print matches one on
record or is a new, unrecorded print, sends
only 25 percent of all fingerprints to department analysts for review.
``Unfortunately,
mutilation can work to evade our system,'' said Detective Lieutenant Deborah
Rebeiro, commanding officer of the State Police unit that oversees the state
fingerprint database, which has about a million records on file and can tap
into national and other state fingerprint databases with nearly 100 million
records. ``The system isn't perfect, but as we increase our networks and this
becomes more of an issue, I think you'll see we'll get better at it.''
Rebeiro and others
noted that fingerprint mutilation is part of a long history of criminals trying
to conceal their identity, which has included everything from assuming the
names of dead people to undergoing extensive plastic surgery. Among the most
notorious cases of a criminal destroying his fingerprints was John Dillinger,
the bank robber who had been on the lam for years in the 1930s and used acid to
burn his fingertips.
But fingerprint
scans have become more sophisticated over the years, and police now require
those arrested to dab all their fingers in ink or have them scanned digitally,
including a nail-to-nail roll that takes in far more of the loops, whorls, and
arches than just capturing an impression of the fingertip.
Officials at the
FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement
said they do not keep national records of the number of suspects found to have
deliberately disfigured their fingerprints.
``It's not
something we really track, but I have heard fingerprint examiners mention a slight
increase of people trying to mutilate their fingerprints, enough for them to
take notice,'' said Steven Fischer, a spokesman for the FBI's division of
Criminal Justice Information Services. ``We've found that most often people who
do this are those who can afford it or a prominent criminal arrested before who
fears multiple arrests.''
Joe Polski - chief
operations officer of the Minnesota-based International Association of
Identification, the world's largest group of forensic scientists - said
analysts at the group's conference this month told him they are seeing an
increase in such cases.
``I wouldn't
describe this as an overwhelming problem, and it's worth noting that once a
fingerprint has been changed and it has been recorded, we have those prints on record,'' Polski
said. ``There are a lot of minutiae in a fingerprint that can't be changed.''
Last month, such
residual data taken from previous bookings helped local authorities identify
Leonel Lopez-Ortiz, an alleged drug dealer from Randolph, and Jorge Falcon
Ortiz, who was arrested in Boston, also on drug trafficking charges. Police
said both had sought to frustrate efforts to identify them by mutilating their
fingers.
Last week,
prosecutors charged three people in a federal court in Massachusetts with
plotting to help illegal immigrants avoid detection by trying to alter their
fingerprints. Among those arrested was Jose Elias Zaiter-Pou, a doctor who flew
from the Dominican Republic and allegedly planned to surgically remove the
fingerprints of illegal immigrants for a $4,500 fee.
At the State Police
office of Crime Scene Services in Sudbury, Lieutenant Martin showed samples of
mutilated prints he has collected
over the years.
Some of the images
revealed small rectangular patches of skin from another part of the body
surgically implanted in the middle of the fingertips, in which the ridge
patterns are distinctly different from the surrounding skin. Others showed
crisscrossing lines or other odd patterns that blurred the surrounding swirls,
probably reflecting cuts from a knife or deliberate burning.
He said some
suspects do better than others in obscuring their identity. Surface cuts do not
do the job, he said; the marring must go deep under the skin, which grows back
with the original patterns if not sufficiently disfigured.
``The people who do
this are pretty desperate,'' he said. ``I can't imagine the pain it must take.
You have to get deep down, in the nerve endings. I see these people, to go to
this extreme, as a real danger to society.''
David
Abel can
be reached at dabel@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @davabel.
