Teaching Forensic Science to the American Police and Public: The Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory, 1929-1938

Abstract

Established in 1929, Northwestern University’s Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory (SCDL), America’s first independent forensic crime laboratory, undertook a wide range of scientific case work during the 1930s, including toxicology, firearms identification, polygraph testing, the analysis of questioned documents and bacteriology; its mission being to provide Chicago with a world-class forensic science service. Alongside this mission, however, a key ambition of the SCDL’s founders was to forensically educate police officers, legal professionals, and the general public. Convinced that American police were largely ignorant of scientific aids to crime detection and that the public’s lack of forensic awareness led to the destruction and contamination of crime scenes, the SCDL attempted to fashion itself as a “school for manhunters.” But, while the laboratory’s ambitious program of public talks, scientific demonstrations, detective schools, expositions, and radio programs were intended to foster the creation of both a scientifically savvy public and policemen on par with those to be found in Europe, the SCDL encountered a number of significant hurdles to achieving these goals, including the hostility of some high-ranking police officials.

Introduction

In late 1929, having just returned from an 80 day tour of European police laboratories and medico-legal institutes, the American ballistics expert, Colonel Calvin Goddard (1891-1955), submitted a 75 page report to the Board of Directors of Chicago’s newly formed Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory (SCDL). Envisaged as the United States’ first “…really comprehensive attempt to combat crime in all its phases by scientific laboratory methods…” (1), the SCDL had been established during the summer of 1929, as one of the outcomes of the investigation of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, and was shortly thereafter affiliated with Northwestern University. Appointed managing director of the laboratory on its foundation, Goddard had been quickly dispatched to Europe in search of institutional templates on which to model this ambitious new enterprise. In his report, titled “Crime Detection Laboratories in Europe,” the Colonel not only provided a highly detailed inventory of the facilities, equipment, and methods mobilized by these European institutions, highlighting the elements that it would be desirable to adopt within the nascent SCDL, but also passed judgment on the poverty of contemporary American forensics. “My provisional opinion,” he lamented, “that the United States is, for the most part, immeasurably behind Europe in scientific methods of crime detection was completely confirmed” (1).

Intended both to justify the establishment of the SCDL and to provide impetus for the development of scientific crime detection in the United States, this indictment was closely followed by an attempt to diagnose the cause of America’s forensic backwardness, which Goddard located in a number of systemic differences between law enforcement in the United States and Europe. In this regard, he noted several important aspects of the European and American systems that either encouraged or discouraged the embrace of scientific crime detection by the police and the public. According to Goddard, the first and perhaps principal difference was that the European Police were commanded by men chosen for high education and marked ability, every one of whom was alive to the importance of employing all possible scientific aids in crime detection. In stark contrast, only too many American police officials lacked advanced education, held office temporarily, and were quite satisfied with “good old fashioned methods,” turning up their noses at anything that smacked of science (1). The second distinction between the two systems, the Colonel declared, was the tendency in Europe, in contrast to the United States, for the organization of Detective Departments to occur on a national, rather than state level; such organization having the advantage of promoting uniform standards of instruction and practice (1). The third distinguishing feature of European policing was the thorough schooling of the European detective in crime scene analysis through attendance at prolonged courses of training. While on the Continent, even the lowly patrolman was issued with a written guide on how to proceed at crime scenes, the United States, as yet, did not offer its officers either an equivalent set of courses or a pocket reference to criminalistics (1). The fourth difference, highlighted by Goddard, was the awareness of the European public that they should avoid the locality of a crime until the police had examined it; an awareness that the Colonel complained the American public lacked. In Europe, this forensic understanding had been fostered through public relations campaigns that highlighted the role of science in modern policing (1). Finally, Goddard noted, European experts were individuals whose qualifications, usually a degree in medicine followed by a diploma in legal medicine, were recognized by the state. In the United States, he complained, the lack of an accreditation system had seen mere pretenders allowed to give “expert” testimony; the result being that “experts,” understood as commodities to be controlled by the highest bidder, had become subjects of ridicule (1).

While it appeared that organizational factors, which resulted from the different configuration of European nation states and their legal systems, had helped foster within them an acceptance of science as an aid to crime detection, the key difference as emphasized by Goddard’s survey of the reasons for the United States’ forensic ignorance was education; be that in terms of the tertiary education of Europe’s higher police officials, the training of their detectives and patrolmen in crime scene etiquette, their public campaigns to heighten the public’s forensic awareness or their use of highly trained and accredited experts. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the Colonel’s report went on to declare not just that the SCDL’s mission would be service oriented, rendering expert help in areas such as ballistics, dust analysis, hemoglobin testing and hair identification to Cook County’s coroner, district attorney, and commissioner of police as well as to reputable individuals, and other law enforcement authorities at a nominal fee, but that it would also be educative (2).

Although there was little the laboratory could do about the atomizing effect of the local, federal, and political frameworks within which the police operated, it could put in place a variety of educational strategies that would forensically inform law enforcement officers and the public, encourage their use of the laboratory’s services and contribute to the professionalization of America’s police (3). In addition, it might help establish qualifications for those intending to practice as forensic experts in the courts. In this regard, Goddard recommended that the SCDL should provide an annual series of lectures for higher local police officials in order to acquaint them with the possibilities of scientific crime detection; develop courses of lectures and demonstrations for police investigators on all topics that the laboratory was equipped to deal with; offer special courses for selected investigators who would act as liaisons between the local police and the laboratory; conduct intensive propaganda through all available media to teach the public its duties with regard to avoiding scenes of crime until they were investigated; engage in the preparation and distribution of a leaflet of instruction for uniformed policemen reminding them what not to do at a crime scene; and foster support among the public in general, and legal and medical societies in particular, for legislation which would make it obligatory for the expert in name to also be an expert in fact; a goal that could be brought to fruition through the establishment of courses in legal medicine and scientific police work at universities like Northwestern (2). Goddard concluded his report on “Crime Detection Laboratories in Europe” by arguing that such steps, if taken under the auspices of the SCDL and combined with his recommendations about the scope of work, organization, and outfitting of the new laboratory, would “…first place us on par with, and later ahead of, Europe in the development and application of ‘Police Scientifique’” (2).

As Goddard’s report makes apparent, in addition to providing a world-class forensic science service, one of the key ambitions of America’s first independent scientific crime laboratory was to forensically educate police officers and the general public. In examining the attempt of the SCDL to become “A School for Manhunters” (4), this article will concentrate on how laboratory staff set about both transforming the American detective into a “scientific policeman,” that is, an officer well-versed in the scientific methods and instruments likely to aid in investigation, and molding the public into forensically aware citizens, who would prove an aid, rather than a hindrance, in the course of criminal investigations (5). In addition, the article will assess how successful the SCDL was in its educative mission and to what extent it modified its approach in light of responses from the police and the public?

Establishing the SCDL

The SCDL was born among the bullets and the bodies of Chicago’s St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, which occurred on February 14, 1929. This murder, part of the war between rival Chicago gangs to control organized crime in the city, saw seven people, including five members of the “Bugs” Moran gang, lined up in a garage on North Clark Street and shot (6). Witness reports indicated that the assassins had arrived on the scene in a large touring car, similar to those used by police squads in Chicago, that some of these men had worn police uniforms and that the weapons used resembled riot guns (6). In a context in which, on the one hand, police corruption and collusion in organized crime was an acknowledged problem and, on the other, members of Chicago’s progressive business and professional elites were actively engaged in efforts to combat organized crime, improve police efficiency, and address political corruption, there was enormous civic pressure to establish the role, if any, of the police in the Clark Street shootings (7). Faced with this onerous task was Herman N. Bundesen (1882-1960), the city’s first medically trained coroner in 65 years, who, when he convened a jury to investigate the massacre, empaneled six well-regarded representatives of Chicago’s business and legal communities (8). As members of the progressive elite, who believed that municipal modernization and corruption could be addressed through the authority of science, these jurymen, eager to establish whether the weapons used and bullets fired during the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre were, in fact, police issue, turned to the nascent forensic sciences (8). Bert A. Massee, jury foreman and vice-president of the Colgate-Palmolive Peet Company, as well as Walter E. Olson, owner of the Olson Rug Company, insisted on and paid for a ballistics expert to be brought in from New York (6).

The expert seconded by Massee and Olson, on the recommendation of Massee’s lawyer, was Colonel Calvin Goddard (6). The Colonel, who developed his expertise in firearms identification in the U.S. Army Medical Corp, had established the New York-based Bureau of Forensic Ballistics in 1926, coming to public attention during a 1927 appeal for clemency in the Sacco-Vanzetti case where he testified that the prosecution had been correct in their contention that one of the fatal bullets had been fired by Nicola Sacco’s gun (9). On his arrival in Chicago, Goddard quickly ascertained that Thompson machine guns, firearms found within the police arsenal, had been among the weapons used in the Clark Street shootings. As a result, he proceeded to test all the tommy-guns in the possession of the Chicago and Cook County police, establishing definitively that the weapons used in the massacre were not of police origin (6). Furthermore, he performed analyses of fired bullets and cartridge cases that in December of 1929 enabled the identification of two guns seized in Michigan as the murder weapons (6). Well before this seizure, however, in the wake of Goddard’s initial findings, Massee, who had been impressed by the efficacy of ballistics in resolving the issue of police involvement in the murders, floated the idea of establishing a ballistics bureau in Chicago (6). The Colonel, who had begun campaigning for forensic science facilities as soon as he arrived in the city, convinced Massee that what America’s “crime capital” really required was not just a ballistics bureau, but “the whole works,” that is, a dedicated crime laboratory (3).

While enthusiasm for the establishment of a crime laboratory in Chicago was immediate, concerns about how political interference might affect the efficacy and public perception of such an enterprise quickly came to the fore. On the face of it, either the Chicago Police Department or the Coroner’s Office would provide a natural home for such a facility, but the politics that surrounded these institutions threatened to undermine the credibility of a laboratory set up under their auspices. In the 1920s, politics and corruption affected the Chicago Police Department and the Coroner’s Office in several ways. Chiefs of police, for example, were often little more than party hacks with minimal or no experience of policing (10). These men, who were swept in and out of office along with the city’s changing political administrations, tended to serve about two years on average and presided over a system that provided favors and payoffs intended to help maintain Chicago’s political factions (11). The office of coroner, an elected position that did not require medical qualifications, was also closely tied to municipal politics and open to corruption. Bundesen’s predecessor, Oscar Wolff, for example, used his position to give jobs to his political cronies, making room for them by firing well-trained and experienced pathologists (8). While a bevy of progressive civic reformers sought to remedy these problems during the 1920s and 1930s by reorganizing police administration or pitting the powers of “organized business” against those of “organized crime,” as did the Chicago Crime Commission, this was set to be a long and slow process that did not address the immediate concerns of the SCDL’s founders. It was in this context, then, that Goddard and Massee, insistent that their enterprise be free of political interference, sought to establish their laboratory as an independent institution.

Of course, while distance from politics was intended to lessen the danger of corruption and strengthen public confidence in the laboratory, the SCDL’s initiators were nonetheless eager to establish the intellectual and scientific credentials of their new facility through connection with a prestigious public institution. With affiliation to the Police Department and the Coroner’s Office out of the question, this left a university. The idea of a formal relationship between the new crime detection laboratory and one of Chicago’s institutions of higher learning quickly gained the support of Walter Dill Scott (1869-1955), President of Northwestern University, and John Henry Wigmore (1863-1943), Dean Emeritus of Northwestern’s Law School, who proceeded to appoint a faculty committee to plan the establishment of such a laboratory on or near the McKinlock campus (12). Enthusiasm for the SCDL and its connection to Northwestern was also evident outside the university with the coroner, Bundesen, telling Massee that “…the Coroner’s Office is very anxious to have established the Bureau of Criminal Science, affiliated with Northwestern University. We feel that there is a tremendous need for such a bureau, and if you will advise me as soon as you have the department organized, we shall be glad to send you the guns, bullets and other evidence we have in certain cases for the purpose of cataloguing, indexing and diagnosing wherever possible” (13). Following a series of reports from the faculty committee on the proposed facility, declaring “…such a laboratory, as a necessary aid in the detection of crime…” and the need for such an institution in the city of Chicago, the SCDL was incorporated as a non-profit organization in June and affiliated with Northwestern University in July of 1929 (14).

After Goddard’s return from Europe in late 1929, the selection of premises at 469 East Ohio Street in Chicago, near the McKinlock campus, took place, followed by the outfitting of the laboratory, its museum and library. At the same time, a permanent staff was selected, which, at its peak in 1931, reached 14. This staff included analysts in toxicology, firearm identification, psychology and deception testing, questioned documents, photography, and photo-micrography and was supplemented by a consulting staff, whose services in fields such as the identification of ancient documents, bacteriology, and the decoding of secret messages were required less frequently (15). While this list of the analysts’ specialisms offers some indication of the forensic work being conducted by the SCDL, the Director’s monthly and annual reports provide a much clearer picture of the nature and volume of scientific case work undertaken by the laboratory and how this changed over time. In its first year, 1929 to 1930, for example, the SCDL overwhelmingly dealt with evidence pertaining to firearms cases, although it was also engaged in the identification of shoe prints, handwriting, typewriters, and human hair as well as the analysis of fingernail scrapings, fingerprints, seminal stains, and poison. During this period, as is evident in Table 1 , the laboratory made use of the polygraph in only 25 cases (16). Statistics for 1931 are missing, but it is nonetheless apparent from one of Goddard’s reports, dated November 25, 1931, that the pattern established during the previous year had begun to reverse, with lie detection overtaking ballistics as the laboratory’s main activity. Goddard wrote, “Firearm Identification. This department, originally the most active one in the laboratory, is fast being overtaken, in the amount of work carried on by the Department of Psychology” (19). By 1932, it is clear that polygraph work had become the laboratory’s main business. This was a trend that continued and accelerated until the laboratory and all its assets were sold to the City of Chicago in mid-1938, becoming an appendix of the Chicago Police Department because of both its failure to weather the financial disaster of the Depression that coincided with its birth or to be financially self-sustaining during the mid-1930s (20 -22).

Table 1:

SCDL Case Work, 1930-1937 (16,17,18).

	Polygraph	Firearms	Documents	Miscellaneous	Scopolamine
1930	25	100	0	27	0
1931a	-	-	-	-	-
1932	98	0	56	15	0
1933	139	0	52	11	6
1934	188	3	18	20	2
1935	395	24	36	36	0
1936	353	15	76	33	0
1937	501	12	75	46	0

^a 1931 = no data available.

Teaching Scientific Crime Detection, 1930-1934

The annual reports of the SCDL’s managing director provide a good idea of the kind and volume of scientific analysis undertaken by the lab for the police and other groups in each year of its operation. These reports also indicate the range of educational activities in which members of the laboratory’s staff engaged. For the first year of its operation, it appears that the SCDL attempted to realize the set of educational objectives outlined in Goddard’s report on European laboratories. The lectures and training it offered were aimed squarely at those working within law enforcement and the legal profession with the aim of introducing them to scientific crime detection and the services offered by the laboratory. There was:

1. A series of 12 lectures, given at weekly intervals, to members of the State’s Attorney’s staff of Cook County (winter 1929-1930).

2. A series of eight lectures, given, at weekly intervals, to the Police Lieutenant’s Association, City of Chicago (winter 1929-1930).

3. A series of about 60 lectures, given at the rate of nine a week, to Detectives in the Chicago Police Department (winter of 1929-1930).

4. Preparation of a training schedule for two members of the State Attorney’s staff, Essex County (Newark) N. J., lasting six weeks (with one week of intensive work at the SDCL) to prepare them for undertaking work in firearm identification.

5. The holding of a “Crime Detection Symposium” at Northwestern University Law School and the SCDL, from August 27th to August 30th, inclusive, involving 11 lectures and demonstrations, and attended by some 40 odd law-enforcement officials from various parts of the United States and Canada (23).

As Director of the laboratory, Goddard, who had also espoused the importance of public understanding and engagement with scientific crime detection, took the SCDL’s message into the community, giving around 20 talks in the course of the laboratory’s first year to organizations, including Kiwanis Clubs, Lions Clubs, Rotary Clubs, American Legion Posts, High Schools, Engineering Societies, Luncheon Clubs, and Discussion Clubs (23). Such talks typically involved lantern slides and discussion of cases solved by scientific methods, but might also include the discussion of experimental results and the demonstration of crime detection technologies like the polygraph, ultra violet light, and the comparison microscope (24 -26).

The lectures, demonstrations, and training offered by the SCDL to both professionals and members of the public were not, however, limited to its initial period of operation. As Table 2 indicates, forensic education, in the form of talks and laboratory demonstrations remained an important part of the SCDL’s educational remit during its first five years. While clearly the number of lectures fluctuated quite markedly, the highs of 1931 and 1932 probably reflecting the appetite of Chicago’s professional societies and service clubs to hear about a ground-breaking new enterprise launched in their city and the low of 1934 almost certainly resulting from the immense concentration of laboratory staff on their 1933-1934 World’s Fair exhibit, the education of the police and the public took up a considerable amount of the SCDL’s time (17). This suggests not just self-interest in promoting the laboratory and its services as a means of remaining financially viable but a real commitment to forensically informing Americans that would eventually result in better, more modern, and efficient policing. While this speaks to the motives of the SCDL in pursuing its educative mission, a closer consideration of the audiences for these addresses is also instructive. Examining how the SCDL’s time was divided between training and education of law enforcement officers as opposed to legal professionals or after dinner talks given at local Rotary clubs provides important clues as to the laboratory’s priorities as well as their continued dedication, or otherwise, to the mission of promoting scientific crime detection to the American police and public. In the period 1931 to 1934, it is apparent that talks to community, service, and professional groups were the most frequent educational or propaganda activities undertaken by laboratory staff, although the number of these were declining, perhaps as public knowledge of the laboratory reached saturation. The more demanding lectures, demonstrations, and training offered to students, police, and attorneys were less frequent occurrences, but after 1931 were roughly on par, in terms of the attention given to each group, indicating that they were accorded equal importance, at least in terms of the laboratory’s lecture program.

Table 2:

Educational Activities by Audience, 1931-1934 (17,19).

	Students	Law enforcement	Legal profession	Community/service/professional groups	Total
1931*	16	13	5	55	89
1932	12	12	10	82	116
1933	19	16	13	26	74
1934	12	2	0	13	27

1931* = Data only available for January to June.

Beyond the professional and public engagement signified by the SCDL’s program of talks, however, there were three other endeavors in the period 1929 to 1934 that suggest the police were the principal targets of the laboratory’s educative mission. The first was The American Journal of Police Science (AJPS), which was established in 1930 as “…an organ for the spread of information as to methods and apparatus that can be used to analyze traces of crime” (23,27). The second was the “Methods of Scientific Crime Detection” course, specifically designed for those employed in law enforcement, and first offered between April 13 and May 9, 1931. The third was a course in police training intended for those who planned to take competitive examinations for appointment as police officers, those who had already passed such examinations and were awaiting a call to service and members of police forces who wanted to increase their knowledge of police administration (28). This course was to be run during February and March 1932.

The AJPS, brainchild of J. H. Wigmore, but inspired by and modeled on European police science journals, was intended to provide a medium for the circulation of scientific discoveries and methods of practical use to the policeman interested in applying science to crime detection. According to the journal’s editors, the lack of such an organ was the chief hindrance to the development of police science in the United States (27). In a similar vein, Goddard stated in his 1930 Managing Director’s Report that

Many police magazines exist in the United States. Few pretend to publish material of a scientific nature. Those that do, intersperse this between articles of local interest only. Our idea was to offer, to persons seriously interested in scientific methods of studying the traces of crime, a journal that would present accurate descriptions of such methods, supplemented by reports of cases in which these had actually been employed successfully, plus other suitable material of general interest to police agencies (23).

With this in mind, the AJPS published articles on the research findings and case work of SCDL staff, provided translations and reprints of important foreign findings in forensic science, and acted as a means of advertising the laboratory’s courses to those with an interest in police science.

All this was laudable, but the AJPS struggled to find a readership. Goddard wrote in this regard, “The magazine is being published at a distinct loss due to the relatively small number of subscribers and the fact that we solicit no advertising. Our losses based on 1000 subscribers run about $1800 per annum on the cost of printing and binding, which is augmented by some $2000 in salaries, or a total of $3500” (29). The journal, in spite of the fact that its editors intended it “…to be read by practical men, who need practical methods for concrete tasks,” was not embraced by the average American policeman, who continued to prefer less academic police and detective magazines (27). While the European journals that had inspired this publication might have thrived, they could expect, as Goddard’s report on European crime detection laboratories had made clear, a significantly better educated audience than that which existed in American police departments. In financial trouble itself, the SCDL could not sustain this expensive and ultimately unsuccessful periodical, which from 1933 was continued in much reduced form within the pages of the Northwestern Law School’s Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. As late as 1938, figures like Wigmore and Fred E. Inbau campaigned to have the AJPS revived as an independent publication, believing this important for the acceptance and expansion of police science in the United States, but these pleas were never heeded.

The Methods of Scientific Crime Detection course, run by the SCDL in 1931 and 1933, was also less than successful in inducting large numbers of American policemen into the mysteries of forensic science, although it did provide excellent publicity for the laboratory and for scientific policing more generally. Advertised in the first issue of the AJPS for 1931 as a program intended for law enforcement officers and others interested in the subject, this course was to involve lectures and laboratory instruction every day for four weeks in 60 different topics, including questioned documents, firearm identification, uses of ultra violet rays, toxicology, truth serum, and sketching a crime scene (30). Prospective students, limited to 50, were expected to purchase and familiarize themselves with Hans Gross’ Criminal Investigation before their arrival in Chicago. Student enrolment included personnel from police departments all over the United States, but also attracted an inspector from a state board of pharmacy, the director of a county crime investigation bureau, a staff writer from Popular Science Monthly, a representative of the Bureau of Investigation, and an investigator for an insurance company. At the end of the course, the participants were assessed on the notebooks they had compiled as well as a practical examination, which involved “…a murder scene being set up in one of the laboratory rooms, the students admitted in groups of five and given one hour to make observations” (31). While this first course was considered by the SCDL as a success in terms of student responses and the valuable media exposure that the series of articles penned by the aforementioned staff writer of Popular Science Monthly afforded the laboratory, a second course, advertised for the autumn months of 1931 was cancelled due to low enrolments. This probably had something to do with the $100 course fee and the deepening Depression, but the fact that the course, when it was revived, in winter 1933, attracted only 35 police officers from across the country, perhaps also indicated the limits of police interest in intensive engagement with scientific detection (3).

The financial difficulties of the SCDL in the early 1930s as well as a desire to forensically inform a new generation of policemen appear to have provided the impetus for the course in Police Training advertised in the AJPS in late 1931. Correspondence between Wigmore and L. V. Jenkins, the Chief of the Portland, Oregon Police, in June 1929 about the Portland Police Training School, which included the school’s manual of instruction, covering among other things the process of obtaining and securing evidence for microscopial analysis, report writing, personality assessment, and law, suggest that the SCDL was interested in establishing its own police training school from very early in its history (32). By December 1931, however, in the wake of the cancellation of the second course in Scientific Detection Methods, it appears that a police training school was regarded primarily as a financial lifeline. In a report sent to President Walter Dill Scott by Leon Green this becomes clear. Green wrote,

We are also seriously considering an additional thirty-day course in police administration to be offered to candidates for appointment as police officers. This course we are contemplating frankly with special view to its possibilities as an income producer and would not be considering it save for this reason. I do not wish thereby to indicate that I feel such a course is not needed, or that it would fail to give those who attend it a training worth several times the tuition fee involved. I do feel, however, that our course in crime detection methods (as already once conducted) is all that the Laboratory personnel can undertake without leaving it in a state of complete physical and mental exhaustion, and that an assumption of a new course (in administration) will take so much out of our staff as to reduce materially their efficiency in the handling of routine laboratory cases as may be assigned them, and render quite impossible the undertaking of research of any kind (33).

In spite of these concerns, the SCDL planned and advertised a course in Police Training to be held early in 1932 that would involve instruction in theories of crime and the criminal, criminal law, the administration of criminal justice, traffic regulations, science and identification, crime scene investigation, patrol and first aid (28). While there was evidently some enthusiasm in the Chicago Police Department and within the pages of police journals like Police “13-13,” for this course, it too had to be cancelled due to low enrolment (3).

Although neither this course in Police Training nor the course in Methods of Scientific Crime Detection, after its second staging in 1933, appear to have been offered again and the interest of the police in forensics, particularly those already established in their careers, remained debatable, the SCDL’s dedication to training police in scientific methods continued after 1934. Under the auspices of the lab’s lecture and demonstration program, where the focus was increasingly on molding new recruits, rather than experienced policemen, efforts to create scientifically savvy cops continued right up until the laboratory’s sale in 1938.

Recalcitrant Policemen

In late 1934, in a radio interview conducted by Wigmore, Leonarde Keeler (1903-1949), who headed the SCDL’s polygraph department, stated that, “Scientific methods in police work in crime detection has come to stay. Each year more and more police departments throughout the country are appealing to the practical scientist for help. Before long the police officer will be a member of a highly trained profession, just as are lawyers, doctors, and pharmacists today” (34). As Wigmore’s skeptical response indicated, however, Keeler must have been dreaming of a situation that did not yet exist. Indeed, if the recollections of Fred E. Inbau, who took over the directorship of the SCDL in 1938 on its sale to the City of Chicago, are to be believed, even in the late 1930s, Keeler’s words remained more dream than reality. In an interview conducted during the 1970s, Inbau recalled:

As a matter of fact, when the laboratory was sold to the Chicago Police Department, I arranged with the commissioner of police to have the officers in command positions come to the lab in small groups to see this laboratory so that we could explain to them how we could assist. I have never met such a hostile group in my life. I just about got on my knees and said, “Gentlemen, this is your laboratory. We didn’t ask you to come in here to instruct you. We just want to show you what you now have that you didn’t have before. Here are microscopes that can be used to match bullets. Here are microscopes that can be used for examining soil specimens. Here is the polygraph.” And so on and so forth. The ones who had some feeling of understanding or sympathy about it were afraid to even ask questions. They didn’t know what image this would create among their colleagues who professed that they could do the job without all of this jazz (35).

Conscious that they needed to present themselves as helpmates, rather than competitors, members of the laboratory were usually careful not to over play their hand, acknowledging the importance of the policeman’s common sense and experience, but their descriptions of his “craft knowledge” as a kind of primitive blunt instrument, can’t have done much to endear them to the ordinary “copper.” For example, in a 1935 article that appeared in the NU Alumni News, Inbau had written,

“Science,” Thomas H, Huxley once said “is nothing but trained and organized common sense, differing from the latter only as a veteran may differ from a raw recruit; and its methods differ from those of common sense only so far as the guardsman’s cut and thrust differ from the manner in which a savage wields his club.” No other words could express more clearly and accurately the relative merits of scientific methods of crime detection as compared with the ordinary methods of criminal investigation. The one does not exclude the other. Science cannot replace the common sense and experience of a “copper;” nor will the scientist remove the “copper” himself (36).

On the other hand, members of the SCDL were more circumspect in their claims than the breathless reports on scientific crime detection work that appeared in a range of popular science magazines. “Popular Mechanics,” “The Detective of the Future” feature, claimed that “The policemen of the future, whether patrolman or detective will be a trained scientist” (37). Edwin W. Teale, of Popular Science Monthly, who had attended one of the SCDL’s courses, noted, in his article titled “Now, Real Detectives Beat Sherlock Holmes” that “Such men begin where the ordinary officer leaves off. Working slowly, painstakingly, utilizing every branch of science at hand, these modern man-hunters are arriving at astonishing solutions in baffling crimes. Their work is analytical, methodical; but their results are amazing, magical” (38). While Teale mentioned the SCDL’s role in training policemen, noting the attendance of seasoned homicide detectives from a dozen cities at the lab’s courses, the focus was squarely on the scientist as detective and the implication was that he would soon replace the policeman entirely.

While there were certainly voices within the American police that called for the advent of the “scientific detective,” there were also those who were highly critical of the contemporary overemphasis on science within policing. In the first camp stood August Vollmer, the so-called “father of modern law-enforcement,” whose programs of police training and professionalization in Berkley, California made this one of the most modern and highly trained forces in the United States. In an article, titled, “The Scientific Policeman,” Vollmer stated that, “…there are still existing in modern police departments thousands of ‘old experienced policemen’ who insist that the scientist has nothing to offer which can assist them in solving their crime problems” (5). Vollmer argued that it was time for police departments to concede that science could help them apprehend criminals and for the more open-minded type of man entering the police service in the United States to lead the way (5). “[E]very young intelligent policeman should know,” he said, “that the most valuable and convincing factors may be invisible without the aid of a microscope or chemical analysis” (5). In contrast, other very experienced and high-ranking policemen like Captain Duncan Mathewson, Chief of Detectives in San Francisco for many years, rejected the work of so-called “scientific nuts” (39). At an August 1930 meeting of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, he announced,

Much has been said and published about the educated college policeman and detective and it is all bunk. Give me the practical detective with actual experience in handling criminals and criminal cases and with ten such men I will do more work than any college professor or so-called expert can do with one hundred of his trained nuts. Most of those that I have seen couldn’t put a harness on a mule, let alone catch a crook…There is an overabundance of self-styled scientific detectives and crime experts in this country. They would have a gullible public believe they are so scientific that the crooks would respond to engraved invitations to visit police headquarters and surrender. Just how long the public will stand for this rot is a question (40).

Science had been useful to police work, he went on to admit, but it had been brought into actual use by practical police, not by scientists and pseudo-psychologists (39).

Al Dunlap, editor of the widely circulated Detective Magazine, commenting on the pro- and anti-science positions that became evident at this conference, admitted he could understand the arguments of both sides, but that in reality there was no real cause for a squabble. “For the past couple of years,” he wrote, “this country has been flooded with highly colored reports, aiming to show that in Europe they have some kind of magic wand called science with which they are able to solve all crime mysteries, and that all their cops and detectives are scientists; whereas in this country the old fashioned detective is ignorant and incompetent and should be displaced by a college-trained scientists” (40). Reality, Dunlap went on to say, was somewhat different, his tour of European laboratories proving that such claims were exaggerated and his survey of crimes committed in the United States revealing that 5% would be a generous estimate of those cases that required the services of a scientific crime specialist. In fact, all the ballyhoo about European scientific crime methods posed a danger that the public would get a greatly exaggerated idea of the importance and efficacy of such methods that would ultimately work to the detriment of science and a weakening of crime investigative forces (10). The fight between exponents of modern science and those who emphasized common sense methods of crime detection could easily be resolved Dunlap claimed, “Science should simply confine its efforts to the solution of all problems that call for special scientific treatment, and never undertake to steal the show, so to speak, by underrating the importance of practical common-sense methods in the general investigation of nearly all crime cases” (40). This advice was perhaps easier given than put into practice. For some members of the SCDL, after close to five years of struggling for recognition of the importance of science to crime detection, the apparent failure of their efforts to educate recalcitrant policemen suggested they should shift their focus to a new target.

Educating Attorneys, Appealing to the Public, 1934-1938

In 1934, the Northwestern law professor Newman F. Baker temporarily took the reins of the SCDL, and in the wake of Goddard’s departure, he appears to have made decisions that altered the direction of the laboratory’s educative mission. In a 1932 article on the scientific detection of crime, coauthored with Fred E. Inbau, he complained of the apathy in the United States about science as an aid to detection and compared the old time “common sense” detective to obsolete forms of transport like the sailing vessel, stage coach, and horse and buggy (41). The rationale that Baker and Inbau presented for a more modern approach to policing was that, “every step in the promotion of scientific crime detection is a step toward the abolition of the cruel and ineffective methods of establishing criminal identity, such as the ‘third degree’, and also a step towards the realization of a criminal trial unhampered by technical procedure and unreliable evidence” (41). While this article remained hopeful of change, by 1934, Baker, now managing director of the laboratory, was evidently so frustrated by the recalcitrance of the police that he exclaimed, “Immovable nincompoops still predominate, it seems, in police administration, and no one looks for the adoption of more effectual police practices before the influence of such individuals is considerably deflated…it is possible that the emphasis of scientific crime detection as a police procedure has been all wrong” (3). In light of this epiphany, Baker now steered the laboratory’s educational program toward lawyers, rather than policemen, launching the first course in scientific detection methods for prosecuting attorneys in the summer of 1934. By 1937, this annual course was attracting more than 100 prosecuting attorneys from 25 states (42). This appears to suggest that having failed to convert policemen to their cause, the SCDL now concentrated on attorneys, rather than policemen. But closer analysis demonstrates they had simply changed tact; using public pressure to convince the police of the need to incorporate science into detection.

As we have seen the SCDL promoted itself and scientific detection more generally through talks and demonstrations given at clubs and societies like Rotary, but it also hoped to reach a wider audience with its use of mass media and its exhibit at Chicago’s 1933-1934 “Century of Progress” World’s Fair. The Director’s report for the year November 15, 1929, to November 15, 1930, had strongly recommended that “moving pictures” be used to quickly and effectively make the SCDL and its work known to the country at large (23). While a note in the April 1935 “Monthly Report” provides evidence that a Paramount newsreel about the laboratory was made, it is clear that it was newspapers, magazines and radio that were more routinely used to promote the SCDL (18). Popular science magazine articles on the Chicago laboratory and scientific detection more broadly have been mentioned, but it is also worth noting briefly the newspaper coverage the laboratory received. Between late June and early July 1931, for example, Rex Collier published a series of six articles on various aspects of the SCDL, including moulage, lie detection, ballistics, and lie detection. These articles appeared in The Milwaukee Journal as well as the Spokane-based Spokesman Review (43). As Edwin Teale’s attendance at the 1931 Crime Detection course had demonstrated, lab members were only too happy to cater to journalists’ curiosity about the SCDL and the result was dozens of newspaper articles syndicated in newspapers across the country, including in Florida, Maine, and New York. But newspapers were not the only means of spreading the word. In late 1934, for instance, Wigmore and Keeler staged a radio interview over the Columbia Broadcasting System, as part of a 12 part series on “The Lawyer and the Public.” Titled “Modern Methods of Crime Detection,” Wigmore’s interview of Keeler introduced its audience to the laboratory’s use of the polygraph, both in the screening of bank employees and the interview of suspects in a case of robbery, explained the application of ultraviolet rays in revealing secret writing and the alteration of documents, and explained how both the comparison microscope and chemical analysis could play a role in identifying weapons (34). Furthermore, Keeler highlighted the almost miraculous powers of science to aid the police in detection by describing a Berkley case where a bundle of dynamite sticks in a wrapper was examined by a Professor of chemistry, who pronounced that “You will find where this bundle of dynamite came from if you will discover a farm upon which there is a fast-running stream of water, pine trees, several kinds of shrubs,…black and white rabbits, a bay horse, a cream colored cow, and Rhode Island red Chickens” (34). Berkley’s captain of detectives on further investigation discovered that the dynamite originated from exactly such a locale and thus had proved to him just what science and the microscope could do. This radio interview did not exhaust the laboratory’s efforts with the wireless. In 1936, four radio addresses on scientific crime detection were given as part of a “Crime and Punishment” series on the network of the Affiliated Broadcasting Company, which provided access to over 20 radio stations. This time Charles Wilson, Katherine Keeler, Clarence Muehlberger, and M. E. O’Neill all spoke about their respective scientific specialisms (44).

Perhaps the most ambitious of all the laboratory’s public relations exercises, however, was their exhibit at the 1933-34 World’s Fair in Chicago, where SCDL exhibits sat alongside those of the Chicago and Evanston Police Departments with the aim, as the journal Police 13-13 put it, of bringing together captains of police and captains of industry in marking 100 years of advancement in the art and science of police work (45). Taking up 2000 square feet in the Hall of Science the exhibit on police science consisted of six sections, two on police communications and criminal identification, belonging to the Chicago police department, one on traffic safety, run by the Evanston police and three, on ballistics, laboratory science and psychology, which introduced fair visitors to the work of the SCDL (45). Wandering into the SCDL’s exhibit you were likely to see, as the World’s Fair Weekly wrote “…just how science works as dramatically as Sherlock Holmes himself, through demonstrations and displays of ultraviolet light, the comparison of bullets and firearms, the lie detector and truth serum” (46). Considerable time, energy, and money was put into the preparation of the exhibit, as the managing director’s report for June 1933 made clear, but these were efforts that were rewarded by approximately 9000 visitors per day in July and 10 000 per day in August (17). While the vast majority of these visitors must have been members of the public, those organizing the police science exhibit were also hopeful of attracting the numerous police officials, policemen, detectives and crime detection experts from the United States and abroad that would be visiting Chicago to attend both the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference and the International Association of Identification convention (45).

While efforts to interest the public in and inform them about scientific detection methods, such as those witnessed in newspaper reports, radio plays and at the World’s Fair can be seen in the light of Goddard’s desire to create forensically aware citizens who would prove a help, rather than a hindrance at crime scenes, they can also be regarded as a means of ensuring that public pressure was brought to bear on the police to use such methods. At the conclusion of one draft of his radio interview with Keeler, for instance, Wigmore declared: “I am sure that there is a remarkable future for scientific methods in the detection of crime, and I hope that an enlightened public opinion will encourage the police to study these methods and to employ them more and more” (34). Another version of the script, however, reveals the SCDL’s ambition to use civic pressure to encourage systemic change within the American police by publically lobbying powerful interest groups. Wigmore and Keeler in their interview highlighted the political and administrative obstacles, much the same as those indicated by Goddard in his 1929 report, which prevented the American policing system from fully exploiting scientific detection methods. These included the short tenure of police chiefs, their dismissal, usually on political grounds, and the consequent inability of the innovations of one administration to survive the downfall of their instigator. These were problems that the pair hoped might be remedied in the near future by the efforts of the Bar Association and other civic organizations (34).

Changing Course, 1934-1938

The historian Keith Barbara has suggested that the lack of enthusiasm exhibited by the police for the possibilities of scientific crime detection led the SCDL to refocus its educational program on prosecuting attorneys by the mid-1930s (3). Certainly, by this time AJPS had proved ineffective in reaching its intended audience and the intensive 4-week courses aimed at law enforcement officials in the early 1930s had come to an end, but the complaints of the frustrated temporary director Baker about the outmoded common sense of the old-time detective and the immovable nincompoops who predominated in police administration, do not tell the whole story.

There is no argument that the SCDL struggled in its efforts to have the police fully embrace the potential of scientific crime detection and that a number of their attempts were hamstrung not only by the unfortunate economic conditions that prevailed in the early 1930s but also by their desire to import, practically wholesale, institutions, and ideas that operated well in a European context, but were unlikely to fit American conditions. While by 1934, with the failure of the AJPS as an independent journal and the ringing of the words of high-ranking police officers like Mathewson in their ears, it is unsurprising that the SCDL should seek to recruit a more sympathetic audience, such as prosecuting attorneys, to their cause, there is evidence that this was in addition to their continued efforts to mold America’s police into scientific detectives. The difference between pre- and post-1934 efforts at educating the police was perhaps recognition that this would be a slow process and one that required approaches tailored to the American police system rather than borrowed from abroad. The intellectually challenging distribution of information about new forensic techniques through the AJPS had not reached its intended audience, so articles in the more popular detective magazines or practical demonstrations might work better. On the other hand, more concentration on public education could foster pressure on the police to use modern scientific methods, combined with an expectation on the part of prosecuting attorneys that the police would aid them in the safeguarding of scientific evidence.

Closer analysis of the rising number of lectures and demonstrations given to law enforcement officers from 1934 onward shows several interesting developments. Before 1934 (see Table 2 ), the bulk of the lectures and demonstrations given to representatives of law enforcement were to chiefs of police, police conventions, and as we have seen, to well-established detectives who took the SCDL’s intensive scientific detection methods course. Beginning in 1933 and 1934, there are a few examples of lectures and demonstrations given to police training schools, but from 1935 onward (see Table 3 ) this appears to have become the norm, suggesting that the laboratory had begun to focus on younger aspiring policemen not yet imbued with their more senior colleagues’ craft knowledge or skepticism (47). For example, the laboratory provided the Recruit School of the Chicago Police Department with multiday courses on firearm identification several times a year, attendance varying between 50 and 417 (47). During 1936, the SCDL began providing the Chicago Park District Police Department Training School with lectures once every couple of months, attendance numbering from 50 to 90 (47). They also became involved, in the same year, with training for those attending the Mid-West Traffic School and Evanston’s Traffic Safety Institute. Similar services were offered to police departments and training schools outside Chicago, with courses given to the Minneapolis Municipalities’ Police Training School in May 1936, the Berkley Police Department in August 1936, and the Kanas Police School in November 1937; attendance being 50, 50, and 30, respectively (47).

Table 3:

Educational Activities by Audience, 1935-38 (18,25).

	Students	Law enforcement	Legal profession	Community/Service/professional groups	Total
1935	9	15	4	26	54
1936	4	19	7	48	78
1937	20	55	11	45	131
1938a	6	15	0	2	23

^a1938 = Numbers available for March and April only.

While this new emphasis on training recruits may have been adopted purely for financial reasons, given what Leon Green had said about the rationale for establishing the SCDL Police Training course in 1931, it is nonetheless arguable that this was the laboratory’s response to those older policemen who rejected the need for scientific crime detection. If, as Dunlap argued, it was unrealistic to simply replicate the model of scientific policing found in Europe, because of the culture of craft-based knowledge that prevailed in the United States, perhaps it was foolhardy to concentrate the SCDL’s educative efforts on policemen already established in their careers and immersed in this culture. To create a new culture of scientific policing it would, therefore, make more sense to focus on new recruits, who would eventually replace the administrative nincompoops, who, Baker felt, stood in the way of the adoption of scientific methods by the police. None of this, of course, is conclusive without a policy statement from Keeler, who took over from Baker as Managing Director in 1935, but the figures in Table 3 do suggest a change of emphasis in the laboratory’s mission of teaching the police, rather than a shelving of this project. Certainly offerings to law enforcement, particularly among new recruits, outstripped those to legal professionals, in spite of the introduction of the course for Prosecuting Attorneys, tending to belie Barbara’s claim that the laboratory abandoned its focus on educating the police after 1934.

Conclusion

In a 1931 letter to the Managing Director of the SCDL, Colonel Goddard, in which he attempted to finalize arrangements for the absorption of the laboratory by Northwestern’s Law School, President Walter Dill Scott stressed that, “the Scientific Crime Detection laboratory has educational functions” (48). While Scott’s purpose here was to ensure university oversight of the courses offered by the SCDL, his statement nonetheless highlights one of the more overlooked functions of America’s first independent crime laboratory. The SCDL’s educative mission, which focused on both the public and the police, was in many ways more significant than its case work and certainly more essential to its success and survival, given that it was established at a moment of severe financial crisis and in a context without a strong tradition of scientific detection. The public lectures, talks at service clubs, radio shows, exhibitions, and tours of the laboratory offered by the SCDL in the period 1929 to 1938 introduced the public to the potential of forensic science and appealed to those, particularly in Chicago, who believed that science might be capable of solving social problems, including organized crime and corruption. Intended not only to create forensically aware citizens but also to ensure civic pressure on the police to adopt the new scientific methods, engagement with the public was a key component of the laboratory’s work.

Similarly, in order to create a market for their services and an appreciation of the value of forensic science for law enforcement, it was necessary to scientifically educate policemen. While the methods used to do this in the early 1930s, including a journal of police science modelled on European publications and intensive courses in scientific methods aimed at detectives, were not enormously successful, they did create publicity for the laboratory and for scientific policing more generally that contributed to the feeling of some senior American policemen that their highly prized craft-knowledge was under attack by a host of “scientific nuts.” This apparent lack of enthusiasm on the part of police and the difficult financial situation the SCDL found itself in by 1934 seems to have steered its educational efforts away from the police and toward a more appreciative audience in prosecuting attorneys. But, while the laboratory’s more public efforts at police enlightenment seem to have come to an end by the mid-1930s, this did not represent a complete abandonment of the SCDL’s mission to create scientifically savvy policemen. Instead, in the mid to late 1930s, the SCDL’s lecture and demonstration program was used to foster a culture of scientific policing among new recruits, who passed through the lab as part of their police training. Although this reorientation was still not enough to ensure the laboratory’s financial security, it certainly helped normalize scientific training for Chicago’s Police and would seem to indicate that the SCDL remained “A School for Manhunters” right up until its sale in 1938.

AUTHORS

Heather Wolffram PhD, University of Canterbury

Roles: Associate Professor in History