Title: Fingerprint
Content:  The French scientist Paul-Jean Coulier developed a method to transfer latent fingerprints on surfaces to paper using iodine fuming. It allowed the London Scotland Yard to start fingerprinting individuals and identify criminals using fingerprints in 1901. Soon after, American police departments adopted the same method and fingerprint identification became a standard practice in the United States. The Scheffer case of 1902 is the first case of the identification, arrest, and conviction of a murderer based upon fingerprint evidence. Alphonse Bertillon identified the thief and murderer Scheffer, who had previously been arrested and his fingerprints filed some months before, from the fingerprints found on a fractured glass showcase, after a theft in a dentist's apartment where the dentist's employee was found dead. It 
Title: Fingerprint
Content:  Fingerprints collected at a crime scene, or on items of evidence from a crime, have been used in forensic science to identify suspects, victims and other persons who touched a surface. Fingerprint identification emerged as an important system within police agencies in the late 19th century, when it replaced anthropometric measurements as a more reliable method for identifying persons having a prior record, often under a false name, in a criminal record repository. Fingerprinting has served all governments worldwide during the past 100 years or so to provide identification of criminals. Fingerprints are the fundamental tool in every police agency for the 
Title: Forensic science
Content:  Sir William Herschel was one of the first to advocate the use of fingerprinting in the identification of criminal suspects. While working for the Indian Civil Service, he began to use thumbprints on documents as a security measure to prevent the then-rampant repudiation of signatures in 1858. In 1877 at Hooghly (near Kolkata), Herschel instituted the use of fingerprints on contracts and deeds, and he registered government pensioners' fingerprints to prevent the collection of money by relatives after a pensioner's death. In 1880, Dr. Henry Faulds, a Scottish surgeon in a Tokyo hospital, published his first paper on the subject in the scientific journal Nature, discussing the usefulness of fingerprints 
Title: Fingerprint
Content:  prevent the collection of money by relatives after a pensioner's death. In 1880 Henry Faulds, a Scottish surgeon in a Tokyo hospital, published his first paper on the usefulness of fingerprints for identification and proposed a method to record them with printing ink. Returning to Great Britain in 1886, he offered the concept to the Metropolitan Police in London but it was dismissed at that time. Up until the early 1890s police forces in the United States and on the European continent could not reliably identify criminals to track their criminal record. Francis Galton published a detailed statistical model of fingerprint analysis and identification 
Title: Fingerprint
Content:  mark on a door. When it was compared with Rojas' prints, it was found to be identical with her right thumb. She then confessed to the murder of her sons. This was the first known murder case to be solved using fingerprint analysis. In Kolkata a fingerprint Bureau was established in 1897, after the Council of the Governor General approved a committee report that fingerprints should be used for the classification of criminal records. The bureau employees Azizul Haque and Hem Chandra Bose have been credited with the primary development of a fingerprint classification system eventually named after their supervisor, Sir Edward Richard Henry.
Title: Henry Faulds
Content:  The method of identifying criminals by their fingerprints had been introduced in the 1860s by Sir William James Herschel in India, and their potential use in forensic work was first proposed by in 1880. Galton, following the idea written by Faulds, which he failed to credit, was the first to place the study on a scientific footing, which assisted its acceptance by the courts. The Japanese police officially adopted the fingerprinting system in 1911. His clinic in Tokyo was bought by Ludolph Teusler and became St. Luke's International Hospital.
Title: Natal Mounted Police
Content:  The Natal Police were the first to introduce finger-printing in Africa for use in forensic identification. The scheme was launched by Sub-Inspector W. J. Clarke of the Natal Police's Criminal Investigation Department (CID) who was impressed by the effective use of finger-printing for solving crime in Calcutta in 1897 and who tried to introduce the system in Natal in 1898. His superiors in the Natal Police did not share his enthusiasm for this new forensic innovation so Clarke launched the system at his own expense. Once it had proved its worth by leading to more arrests and crime-solving finger-printing became part of normal police procedure in Natal. So effective was the system that by 1910 the Natal Police's CID had more sets of finger-prints in its records than Scotland Yard had in its. Clarke was to succeed Dartnell as Chief Commissioner on his retirement in 1903
Title: Henry Classification System
Content:   Although fingerprint characteristics were studied as far back as the mid-1600s, the use of fingerprints as a means of identification did not occur until the mid-19th century. In roughly 1859, Sir William James Herschel discovered that fingerprints remain stable over time and are unique across individuals; as Chief Magistrate of the Hooghly district in Jungipoor, India, in 1877 he was the first to institute the use of fingerprints and handprints as a means of identification, signing legal documents, and authenticating transactions. The fingerprint records collected at this time were used for one-to-one verification only; as a means in which records would be logically filed and searched 
Title: Fingerprint
Content:  In 1823 Jan Evangelista Purkyně identified nine fingerprint patterns. The nine patterns include the tented arch, the loop, and the whorl, which in modern-day forensics are considered ridge details. In 1840, following the murder of Lord William Russell, a provincial doctor, Robert Blake Overton, wrote to Scotland Yard suggesting checking for fingerprints. In 1853 the German anatomist Georg von Meissner (1829–1905) studied friction ridges, and in 1858 Sir William James Herschel initiated fingerprinting in India. In 1877 he first instituted the use of fingerprints on contracts and deeds to prevent the repudiation of signatures in Hooghly near Kolkata and he registered government pensioners' fingerprints 
Title: Boston Police Department
Content:  On August 23, 1995, the BPD became the first police agency to send fingerprint images to the FBI electronically using the newly created EFIPS (now IAFIS) system. The first set of fingerprints were for a suspect arrested for armed robbery. Within hours of the receipt of the fingerprints, the FBI determined that the suspect had a number of prior arrests, including one for assault with intent to kill.

Question: when was fingerprinting first used by the police?
Answer: the early 20th century.
In 1840.