Computerised fingerprint system ‘revolutionary’

Press, 7 May 1987, Page 44

Computerised fingerprint system ‘revolutionary’

NZPA-AP Washington Computerisation has revolutionised fingerprint identification systems and eventually will help the authorities break previously unsolvable crimes, says the United States

Government. The Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics concluded in a study that an automated fingerprint identification system could make “incredibly fine distinctions among thousands or millions of prints.” The machine’s matcher could process about 500 to 600 prints a second, the bureau said. The report noted that the highly publicised California “Night Stalker” case was broken by a latent print lifted from a stolen car entered into the State’s new identification system. An unsolved 1978 killing in San Francisco was cracked in a matter of minutes after a set of prints left at the crime scene was entered into the Police Department’s new automated print system. The report said that during the first few months of operation in Baltimore the system identified 525 men and women arrested in the city who were using aliases. The F. 8.1. has almost completely computerised its files of 23 million criminal fingerprints. It now makes 14,000 searches for

criminal justice purposes each day. A computer “can compare a news, fingerprint with huge cqUections of file prints in a matter of minutes,? making identifications “that previously were f possible only through a time-consuming and error-prone process of manual comparison,” the study said.