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GCN Home > 09/10/07 issue

Crime solving done by hand

Texas county’s automated print system works across databases to track, finger suspects

By Michelle S. Haase

The Sheriff’s Department in Bexar County, Texas, recently completed the installation of a new automated fingerprint identification system to help streamline the jail booking process and identify criminals more quickly. Within its first week of use, the system provided a new lead in an unsolved 1993 homicide.

Before implementing the automated system, the county used a manual database, but the growing population in the county — which includes San Antonio — has resulted in a larger number of arrests, and the Sheriff’s Department had a hard time keeping up.

“We’re averaging an intake of 207 people a day with the same size staff as 15 years ago, when we were handling maybe 100 people a day,” said David Dunbar, supervisor of Identification Services at the department. “We needed to go automatic just to keep up with the processing involved.”

“When a person is brought in the door, we put them on the Fast ID system and see if they exist in our database.” — DAVID DUNBAR, BEXAR COUNTY, TEXAS
The county uses NEC’s Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS), which captures fingerprints and palmprints and compares them to prints stored in the county’s database.

If the county doesn’t get a match, it can send the print to the Texas Department of Public Safety, whose database contains about 6.5 million prints, said Chuck Thomas, client solutions manager at NEC’s Identification Solutions Division.

If the Texas DPS does not find a match, the process goes to the next link in the chain, forwarding the print to the FBI. AFIS captures prints in the standard format specified by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the only format the federal government accepts.

Thomas said that if no manual intervention is necessary — that is, the print quality is good and the NIST requirements are met — AFIS can conduct an end-to-end search from the county to the state to the FBI in less than an hour.

For Bexar County, one of the key AFIS applications is FastID, which captures an arrestee’s fingerprints — usually one print from each hand — before the formal booking process begins.

More news on related topics: Authentication / Identity Management, Content / Record Management, Data Management, State & Local



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