AURORA, Colo.—For fingerprint examiners who spend each day focused on some of the tiniest details imaginable, the little things become pretty important.
So when the Colorado Bureau of Investigation announced recently that it was replacing the state’s 20-year-old fingerprint system, it was a big deal at the Aurora police crime lab.
“It’s as exciting as the world of fingerprints gets,” said Sandra Wiese, a latent fingerprint examiner and crime scene investigator for Aurora police.
According to CBI, the current Automated Fingerprint Identification System, or AFIS, is likely one of the oldest in the country used by a statewide law enforcement agency.
The system includes nearly 2.7 million master fingerprint records, according to CBI, that police can use to compare latent prints found at crime scenes. That enables officers to ID suspects in crimes where there otherwise isn’t a suspect.
But the old system, which was implemented in 1993, isn’t keeping up with CBI’s demand.
When AFIS launched, it was designed to process about 700 fingerprint cards in a 24-hour period. Today, CBI greatly outpaces that rate, processing between 1,000 and 1,500 fingerprint cards every day. That doesn’t include the latent fingerprints submitted by police around Colorado.
According to CBI, the new system will not only keep up with that volume, it will help law enforcement and criminal justice agencies identify criminals and exclude innocent suspects from suspicion.
“An accurate and responsive system is important in helping law enforcement agencies confirm a person’s identity more quickly and accurately,” CBI Director Ronald Sloan said in a statement.
Lance Clem, a spokesman for CBI, said the new system will cost about $2.5 million.
The high-tech system allows CBI for the first time to compare palm prints. In the future, the system will allow for hand-held fingerprint units, use of full palm prints, photographs and iris scans.
Wiese said the palm-print technology is particularly exciting to investigators.
“Sometimes only palms are left and sometimes you have a really good palm print and not a good fingerprint,” she said.
Once the palm print database is developed—something that will take years as law enforcement agencies take suspects’ palm prints along with fingerprints—Wiese said it will be a similar resource to the DNA database investigators now rely on.
And, Wiese said, the new system will mean examiners in the department’s crime lab will be able to analyze prints from their desktop computers. Today, they have to rely on the department’s AFIS-linked computer, a large, dated PC situated in a tiny, crowded office.
“I think it will make our job more efficient for sure and I think we will have a higher solve rate,” she said.
The new equipment will hopefully arrive at APD in the coming months, she said. CBI said the statewide system should be operational by January 2013 and the agency projects it will be among the most advanced in the country and efficient for a decade.
