The earliest recorded use of fingerprints for identification purposes in Hawai‘i occurred in 1896. That was thirty-eight years after the practice was pioneered by William Herschel in India and only five years after its initial application in police investigations, in Buenos Aires. Act 13 of the 1896 Legislature, approved April 22, required all male residents of the Republic of Hawai‘i, fifteen years and older, to register with the government, and moreover specified that the registration form was to include the registrant’s “thumb mark.” Less than eight weeks later this law was repealed by the same legislative session, but not before a number of compliant males had duly completed the form and affixed their thumb prints.

We don’t know when Island police departments adopted fingerprinting for criminal detection, but it must have been before 1917. That was the year in which the territorial legislature passed an act “to provide for the establishment of systems for the identification of criminals,” appropriating $3,000 to install a fingerprinting system at O‘ahu Prison and the county jails.

By Robert C. Schmitt