Frenzy of Fingerprinting

Worried parents rush to get a record of their children

The lines of wide-eyed children at five shopping malls in Broward County, Fla., last week were not waiting for the opening of Return of the Jedi. Instead, their parents had brought them to mark a somber occasion, Missing Children Day, in sober fashion: by voluntarily getting fingerprinted. The phenomenon has swept communities throughout the nation; it has sometimes been spurred by a local tragedy, sometimes by the many articles about missing children or the recent film Without a Trace, based loosely on the disappearance in 1979 of a New York City youngster, Etan Patz. The purpose of the fingerprinting is to aid law enforcement agencies in the event that one's child becomes one of the 50,000 who are abducted by strangers each year.

Fingerprinting for children has won the backing of the FBI, state and local police, politicians, churches, schools, civic groups and businesses. In Waltham, Mass., 93% of the 4,600 grammar and junior high students have rolled their fingers on print cards at school since March. In Topeka, Kans., more than 8,000 youngsters, ages nine months to 17 years, have showed up at malls, churches, schools and scout troop meetings since Christmas to take advantage of the police-sponsored Ident-A-Kid program. On Mother's Day weekend, employees of Honeywell in Clearwater, Fla., brought 93 of their offspring to the office to participate in the company-sponsored Operation Ident. That same weekend in New England, 40 McDonald's restaurants promoted a "Thumbs Up!" Mcfingerprinting.

The programs are voluntary, and parents usually keep the only records. Some states, including Texas and Vermont, for bid law enforcement agencies to file the prints of juveniles. But a number of communities are considering allowing police or schools to have copies of the documents; critics attack this practice as a violation of a youngster's constitutional rights to privacy and against selfincrimination.

Rhode Island state police last February established a central "civil depository" for children's fingerprints and other identifying information, claiming that the records would never be used against them if their fingerprints turned up in later criminal investigations. Two weeks ago, after a furious public debate, a new law ordered the depository to shut down. Says a relieved Steven Brown, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Rhode Island: "Parents were in essence waiving their children's privacy and freedom from selfincrimination. They can't do that, even though they are parents." Bills setting up guidelines for fingerprinting children are pending in several state legislatures, including New York's, New Jersey's and Massachusetts'.

There are other, nonconstitutional concerns as well. Though most youngsters seem to enjoy the fingerprinting ritual, Pediatrician Benjamin Spock warned two weeks ago that "children worry about things they don't understand." And they may worry if they do understand the fear that prompts their parents. Is taking a child's fingerprints effective? Mary Jones of Florida's Missing Children Information Clearinghouse, who supports the new programs, acknowledges, "Fingerprinting helps only if we find a child who is either small and can't say his name or an amnesia victim or dead."

True enough, and dental records, when available, can do the same job. The various fingerprint programs are too new to have helped make any identifications yet. But in the '30s and '40s because of a Boy Scouts' crime-stopping campaign, there was some voluntary fingerprinting of youngsters and adults. The FBI, which has many of those earlier records, says the prints have helped identify victims of fires, airplane crashes and crimes. Few believe, however, that the present print wave will deter many kidnapers or help locate many missing children. Still, for frightened parents it satisfies the need to do something. Says Martha Carter, whose son and two daughters had their prints taken in a Dallas suburb in April: "We mark all our silver. We might as well have some way to identify our children." Then she adds the prayer of every parent with a child's fingerprint card: "I hope to never have to use it." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.