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To Jennifer Hannaford, the idea seemed overwhelming. Anyone interested in becoming the first civilian director of the fingerprint lab at the Boston Police Department must be crazy, she thought. The lab’s problems were well documented. Shoddy work there had sent a man to prison for a crime he did not commit and forced then-Commissioner Kathleen O’Toole to shut down the lab in October 2004. A year later, the department needed someone to start over. And, in a controversial move, O’Toole decided the unit wouldn’t be led or staffed by cops. But the leader wouldn’t be Hannaford. No, no, she was happy working as a fingerprint examiner and living single in Vermont, and she wasn’t going anywhere near that job in Boston.

Still, she was a little curious. So she came for a visit, inquired about the position, and took a tour of the facility. What she found didn’t surprise her. The unit had hundreds of backlogged cases and lacked proper procedures for processing evidence. But Hannaford had faced similar problems at the Vermont Forensic Laboratory. And she knew how to solve them. She could handle this. She went home, sent off her resume, and landed the $75,000-a-year gig. And that’s where the real challenges began.

Hannaford – all 4 feet 9¼ inches of her (“And don’t leave that quarter out,” she says, “I earned it.”) – was suddenly an outsider among insiders, a civilian with a BlackBerry amid officers with badges. Even Captain Detective Thomas Dowd, who oversees the forensic division and who supported her, admitted some people were skeptical. A slip of a woman? From the hotbed of criminal activity that is Vermont? Telling Boston police how to run their fingerprint unit? “She had to, in a way, prove herself,” says Dowd.

A year and a half later, with the city in the throes of a crime wave and the public demanding swift justice for every shooting, few – if anyone – are questioning Hannaford’s competence. It’s hard to argue with results. Last year, her lab recovered prints on 32 percent of firearms involved in crimes, a quantum leap for the Boston unit. “Literally, we were at, like, 2 percent before,” says Suffolk County Assistant District Attorney Patrick Haggan. “And in every case, we had to sit there and explain to a jury why we didn’t find any prints.” Hannaford’s leadership turned that around, says Haggan’s boss, District Attorney Daniel F. Conley. “She’s running a very professional shop,” he says. “She’s there all the time, it seems.”

Hannaford, who is 38, has always kept busy. Growing up in tiny Placerville, California, two hours northeast of San Francisco, she was student-body president of her high school and a forensic-science major at Sacramento State University – pre-O.J. Simpson, when most people didn’t have the vaguest clue what forensics were. Hannaford didn’t either, at first. She thought she wanted to go to medical school, and forensic science seemed like an odd enough major to get her noticed. But she got hooked on the work, landed a job in the criminalistics unit at the Oakland Police Department in 1995, and stayed until 2000. Then things took an odd turn: Longing to be more creative, Hannaford briefly attended Boston Architectural College. But it didn’t last. She couldn’t resist the pull back to the lab, joining the Vermont Forensic Laboratory and staying there until she took the Boston position in October 2005.

“I really felt like I knew how to do this job,” she says. It offered the pace of Oakland with the organizational challenges of Vermont. “I wasn’t here to fix what they did,” Hannaford says of her predecessors. “I was here to do what I thought was right. And that was to start over.” In the past, the unit lacked protocols. What one fingerprint examiner did one way, Hannaford says, another might do another way. “There didn’t seem to be a cohesive plan,” she says. So she made one and then helped build a new staff of trained civilians. Next, she began to rearrange the furniture. The lab at police headquarters simply wasn’t big enough. So she got approval to knock down a couple of walls, and what was supposed to be her office, with a nice view overlooking Tremont Street, became still more work space.

Standing in the middle of that room, she stretches her arms wide. “I gave up a big window, didn’t I?” She laughs at the thought and then retreats to her smaller, windowless office with blue walls and blue carpet. Detectives e-mail and call: They found something, they need her. And she snaps to it. Hannaford knows the stakes. She knows people are watching her lab, and she knows the power of fingerprints to convict or to exonerate. She’s fascinated by the ridges on our fingers, how they bend and swirl. She spends countless hours studying them and has even used them to create designs of her own. Hannaford has painted entire portraits using only her own fingerprints.

But she hardly has time for that these days. When asked about how many backlogged cases the unit needs to process, she replies, “It’s still substantial.” Meantime, as she pushes to get the lab accredited by the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors – a certification that’s not required but that top labs strive to obtain – new cases keep piling up.

It’s daunting, never-ending work. But Hannaford, whose enthusiasm is widely known in the department, is not doing it alone. She has six criminalists working with her, and she has gone out of her way to enlist the help of beat officers. Last year, her team retrained police officers in every corner of the city, teaching them how to collect evidence. They call her all the time now, telling her what they’ve found and asking if it’s worth searching for prints. “Yes,” she invariably answers. “Send it in.”

Keith O’Brien’s last story for the magazine was about an energy-efficient car engine designed by MIT engineers. E-mail comments to keith@keithob.com.