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Trumbull jail now keeps photographic record of inmate tattoos
Photo
Marcello
By Ed Runyan
Warren
With an increasing number of people having tattoos, Trumbull County jail officials decided to make better use of them as an identification tool.
Individuals booked into the jail have not only a traditional “mug shot” photo of his or her face taken, but also photos of tattoos.
The detective bureau requested the extra photos of tattoos, jail officials said.
Some people with several tattoos now have as many as four or five photos on file to show the designs in places such as arms, shoulders or necks.
Jolene Marcello, a detective with the Trumbull County Sheriff’s Office, said tattoos can help solve crimes.
“It’s a great tool to identify someone when we don’t have a name and someone says, “They have X,Y,Z tattoo.’ It helps in finding out who that person is,” Marcello said.
It can also be useful to identify a body.
“In autopsies, when it’s a suspicious death, we can sometimes identify someone” using tattoos, especially if the person has a criminal history, she said.
Eric Shay, Trumbull County jail administrator, said the jail has kept track of tattoos for many years but only by giving a description of a person’s tattoos, indicating its location on the body and keeping that information in the jail records.
But having color photos now makes the information more valuable.
Detective John Greaver of the Warren Police Department said Warren police detectives rarely ever use tattoo photos to solve a crime.
More common is to use tattoo descriptions from witnesses to point investigators in a certain direction.
For example, a tattoo might suggest that a person associates with a certain group or lives in a certain area, he said, adding that he hasn’t used the county’s mug shot system to look at tattoos, but he has used other tattoo databases.
A check last week of recent booking mugs showed that about 20 percent of booking photos included pictures of tattoos.
A 2006 study from the Pew Research Center indicates that 23 percent of Americans have at least one tattoo, but close to 40 percent of adults between age 18 and 40 have at least one.
The percentage of adults 41 to 64 with a tattoo was only 10 percent.