To avoid ID, more are mutilating fingerprints

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.

~ more... ~