Crime-Solving
Technology Coming to
Many of you watch television programs such as “C.S.I.”
and others where the
technology used for forensic purposes, such as DNA and fingerprint comparisons,
is lightning fast and instantaneous matches of suspects are made in a matter of
seconds.
Those of us working in law enforcement know that this potential capability can
exist but
is not the everyday scenario. Those
“instantaneous matches” actually can take minutes,
days, or weeks.
I am pleased to announce that this year the Sheriff’s
Office has plans to purchase an
Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) that will make matches of
suspects
with stored fingerprints and palm prints within
seconds. This purchase will be made on
behalf of all the local law enforcement agencies.
In the late 1990s, the State Legislature passed a law
requiring that the Department of Motor
Vehicles collect one dollar ($ 1) from each vehicle registration fee to be
placed in individual
counties’ Automated Fingerprint Identification Trust Funds.
In furtherance of the goal to
eventually get all the counties in the State of
State authorized advisory committees in each county, called Random Access
Network (RAN)
committees, to be the authorized advisory body for the development and
acquisition of equipment
with the AFIS funds. In 1999, the
RAN committee in this County, with the leadership of
Sheriff Mark Tracy and other partners, completed
a needs assessment that defined a 5-year
plan to expand the AFIS capability within
What will this system
do? AFIS is basically a storage
and retrieval system for finger and
palm print electronic images and demographic data.
It is an ultra high-speed, high capacity
system that enhances the ability of latent fingerprint examiners to search and
identify crime
scene evidence against an ever-increasing pool of fingerprint records.
To expand this capability
throughout our county, criminal fingerprint input terminals will be located at
various sites, including
the Main Jail and other law enforcement agencies.
A smaller component of the project includes
a pilot test of fingerprint capture devices in patrol cars. The fingerprints
will be captured in the field,
search a local database, and send a photo return, if any, of the person checked. Patrol officers
frequently encounter individuals with outstanding arrest warrants that will give
the officer a false
name to avoid arrest.
Currently, people arrested and booked at the Main Jail have
their fingerprints submitted electronically
to the California Department of Justice’s database in
with the millions of fingerprint records stored in their database.
Sometimes, this system gets overloaded
due to the sheer volume or there are problems with connectivity and
“returns” on the comparisons can
take several minutes or hours. The
and then send the fingerprints to
Many of those arrested in this county are local residents and the
fingerprint comparison by this local system
will take only a few seconds since the amount of records searched first will be
much smaller compared
to the State system. Due to
the sophisticated technology now available, the accuracy rate is virtually
100% and a booking photo of the person would be automatically generated along
with any positive
“hit”. In addition, this trust
fund will also provide funds for an additional fingerprint examiner to search
and identify latent fingerprints collected at crime scenes by the various local
police agencies.
You can see the enhanced crime-fighting capabilities that
this system should provide. It will improve
accuracy and timeliness of identification processing, reduce reliance on
labor-intensive and time
consuming manual processes on identification and recordkeeping(which creates
backlogs), positively
and immediately identify suspects trying to avoid detection through the
automated system, positively
identify persons at the time of booking with records of latent fingerprints
stored in unsolved crime files,
submit the fingerprints automatically to the State’s fingerprint system, and
allow forensic examiners to
compare latent fingerprints and palm prints gathered at crime scenes against a
database of all Santa
Cruz County offenders.
Ultimately, this state funded system provided for our local
law enforcement agencies will continue
to make
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Santa Cruz County
Sheriff |