Introduction. Operational investigative identification of a person is of great importance for the investigation of crimes and ensuring public safety. Due to the fact that there is no unified understanding of the term "identification of personality" in the theory of operational investigative activities, scientists constantly turn to its research and interpretation, offering their own concepts that often contradict each other. In the absence of a legal formulation that reveals the content of the concept of "identification of personality", the law enforcement officer has a lot of questions, which this study is designed to partially resolve. Research methods. The work used a general scientific dialectical method of cognition of the surrounding reality, which involves a complete and comprehensive study of phenomena, consideration of connections and contradictions between them. In addition, the method of description, logical comprehension, abstraction and generalization were used. Results. Based on the study of the points of view of scientists, the article reveals differences in approaches to the interpretation of the concept of "identification of personality", in determining the methods of implementing this operational investigative measure and the objects of identification work. The author comes to the conclusion that identification of a person is not just an identification event, but a search and identification event, since during its implementation actions can be carried out aimed at the physical detection of the identified object, including using automated biometric systems. The identified objects include criminals; wanted persons; missing persons; unidentified corpses; eyewitnesses to the crime and persons with operationally significant information; persons affected by the crime. Among the signs by which a person is identified, static and dynamic are distinguished. The broadest in content is the term "operational search identification", which includes a combination of three operational search activities – "examination of objects and documents", "making inquiries for identification purposes" and "identification of a person" in various combinations.
identification of personality, operational identification, information about personality, objects and methods of identification work