The Myth of Fingerprints

In this week's Batman And Robin #23, Judd Winick has Bruce Wayne explain why no one can identify the incarcerated Jason Todd:

Hmmm, this bears examination.

**Not all that long ago, Bruce was framed for murder, arrested and jailed. He was fingerprinted then, right? So did he (or Oracle) go in afterward and erase those records? Because that would leave a pretty big clue-sized whole in the records should Bruce Wayne ever be arrested again, or the police have reason to reference those records--"Hey, where's his records? What's going on here?"

Or did they replace his prints in the records with some others? Which, again, creates problems should Wayne ever be printed again. Harvey Bullock: "Sorry, chump, theses prints don't match. You're not Bruce Wayne--you're an imposter! Take him in, boys!"

Or, like those Q provided James Bond in Diamonds Are Forever, was Bruce wearing fake fingerprints when he was booked?

Does he wear those all the time, to prevent stray Bruce Wayne fingerprints from being surreptitiously collected off of martini glasses and Lamborghinis?

**Ditto Dick Grayson--he was a police officer in Bludhaven, and many police departments routinely fingerprint all their cops (so they can quickly eliminate stray cop fingerprints found at crime scenes). And such prints would have been uploaded to state and federal databases, so even though Bludhaven was destroyed (twice!), those records would still exist...

(Did you ever notice how Bludhaven has become the Alderan of the DC Universe, destroyed (twice!) as a cheap gimmick to show how evil the villains were and then never, ever mentioned again?)

**Has Bruce/Barbara shared this technology with other heroes? A recent Flash showed that Barry Allen's fingerprints/DNA were still in the Central City police computers...

**Of course, there's a story idea here, because what if this "erase all our fingerprints" program got into the wrong hands, or malfunctioned, and the fingerprints of every perp in Gotham were erased, accidentally or deliberately? Everyone released from jail, anarchy in the streets...

**Finally, one has to wonder at Batman's obsession with this level of hyper-security over secret identities when roughly 25,000 people already know his secret identity...seriously, what's the point anymore?