Gustav Roscher

Gustav Roscher (born June 25, 1852 in Elze ; † December 24, 1915 in Hamburg ) was a German lawyer and from 1900 to 1912 police chief and from 1912 police chief in Hamburg.

The son of the doctor Gustav Roscher attended the cathedral high school in Verden . In 1870 he passed the Abitur and studied law in Munich and Göttingen . In 1874 the trainee examination took place in Celle . The clerkship he graduated in Elze , Stolzenau and Hannover . In 1879 he passed the assessor exam and worked for the public prosecutor's offices in Hildesheim and Verden. In 1889 he became a public prosecutor in Hamburg. In 1890 Roscher acquired Hamburg citizenship . On August 3, 1892, he was promoted to deputy chief public prosecutor, on January 16, 1893, he was police advisor. The criminal police, founded in 1875, and the political police were subordinate to him. Roscher used study trips to England, France, Austria, Hungary, Belgium and Holland to find out about possible improvements in police work.

At the turn of the century, he succeeded in significantly increasing the resolution rate of crimes by introducing a personal identification system and the most modern communication systems. Roscher introduced the anthropometric system for personal identification developed in France by Alphonse Bertillon in Hamburg. With the help of map registers, information about individual people could be found quickly using predefined categories. By 1899, 80 boxes with 190,000 entries had been created. A large number of technical innovations for the fight against crime were acquired during this time. Even before he was appointed head of the criminal investigation department, a photography department was set up in 1889. Roscher promoted the identification service sustainably and the city gave the money to it. State-of-the-art cameras and duplicators were purchased. The photo department became one of the leading institutes in the world and was unique in all of Germany. In the first six years, 57,807 images with 225,857 images were taken. In 1895 the telephone was set up in the police headquarters in the town hall, and from November 1896 all offices in Hamburg's twelve criminal districts were connected to the telephone network. In Roscher's activity, the Hamburg dockworkers strike in 1896/97 . At times, up to 16,000 workers went on strike. In a memorandum, Roscher recommended better remuneration for the hard physical work and the removal of further grievances. In 1897 a crime museum, a library with specialist literature and a forensic laboratory were opened. From February 1, 1900 Roscher held the office of police director, which in 1912 was renamed "Police President". In 1903 he introduced dactyloscopy , which replaced the anthropometric system for personal identification as a fingerprint process. Roscher wrote standard works on the city police and the dactyloscopy.

Fonts

• Manual of dactyloscopy. Edited for self-tuition. Leipzig 1905
• Metropolitan Police. A practical manual for the German police. Hamburg 1912

Web links

• Matthias Blazek: "100 years ago, Hamburg's police chief Gustav Roscher published a standard work on combating crime," MyHeimat.de

literature

• Claus Gossler: Roscher, Gustav. In: Hamburgische Biografie , Vol. 5, ed. by Franklin Kopitzsch and Dirk Brietzke , Göttingen 2010, pp. 306-307, ISBN 978-3-8353-0640-0
• Werner Roscher: Memories of Police President Dr. Gustav Roscher, 1890–1915 . Hamburg 1959
• August Ludwig Degener, Walter Habel (Ed.): Who is who ?: The German Who's Who . Vol. 6, Leipzig: Degener 1912, p. 1329

Remarks

1. ^ Claus Gossler: Roscher, Gustav. In: Hamburgische Biografie, Vol. 5, ed. by Franklin Kopitzsch and Dirk Brietzke, Göttingen 2010, pp. 306–307, here: p. 306.
2. ^ Andreas Roth: Fight against crime in major German cities, 1850-1914. A contribution to the history of the criminal investigation. Berlin 1997, p. 98.