December, 1996
Don't Mess With the Law -- Imaging is Back in Town
Imaging helps law enforcement agencies. It makes day-to-day paperwork more manageable. It goes to work fighting crime. Imaging lets our men (and women) in blue get out from behind their desks. It's vital to solving crimes and putting the guilty behind bars.
The paperwork for a crime begins at the scene. Police officers have to deal with scene reports, witness statements, composite drawings and fingerprints. Manual systems waste valuable time. They force the detectives to visit different administrative locations after they've already collected the physical evidence. They have to review the evidence, search through files and order fingerprints and photos from a lab. Imaging systems can help. For example, Kodak's (Rochester, NY 716-724-4000) QuickSolve stores all this information on CDs. This lets the cops review all these elements on a desktop PC.
The paper trail doesn't end when a criminal is arrested. Inmate records must be recorded accurately to avoid liability. Jails keep records of inmates' meals, medical treatment, property, court appearances, personal visits and bail details. A jail's best protection against liability is an imaging system that manages the workflow of inmate records.
Perceptics' (Knoxville, TN 423-966-9200) Criminal Justice Management Systems is designed specially for inmate records management.
In America, we have a wealth of criminals. Police departments are overwhelmed with records, mug shots and fingerprints. Everything has to be kept on file. More and more precincts use imaging to create and store these images.
Police artists create composites with software that lets them pick skin tone, hair color and texture, nose shape and so on. These composites are often more accurate or life-like than their hand-illustrated counterparts. (They're much better than in the past, where the composites of criminals had boxes around their nose, mouth and eyes.) In many cases, imaging has been used to ID suspects.
Live scanners capture fingerprint images better than the messy ink method. Fingerprint compression software reduces image sizes by as much as 15:1. A fingerprint card takes up about 10 megs of space. Compression lets law enforcement agencies transmit these images more quickly over intranets to other locations. It reduces the amount of storage they have to buy. It improves retrieval times. This is very important, because there are thousands of criminal records. (Justice should also be swift.)
Boston Police Department Saves 40,000 Hours
The Boston Police Department (BPD) is seeing the positive results imaging brings to police departments. They installed Comnetix's (Mississauga, ON 905-274-4060) Constable, a proprietary, total identification imaging architecture. It includes Identix's (Sunnyvale, CA 408-739-2000) TouchPrint 600 live-scan fingerprint units and Aware's (Bedford, MA 617-276-4000) WSQ fingerprint compression software.
This city-wide electronic fingerprint/mug shot booking system has proven itself infinitely valuable in saving time and money over the last two years. Perpetrator identification has increased and the overall crime rate has dropped.
"Before we installed the system, we were spending about $40,000 transferring prisoners and paperwork to a central facility for processing," says BPD deputy commissioner William Casey. "Paperwork all used to be done by hand.
"For minor crimes, we couldn't even get criminal records. Now we fingerprint every arrest," says Casey. "Because the processing can be done on-site, we have current photos and fingerprints of every arrest. The arrest booking sheets become part of an Oracle database, stored on an Alpha server."
The FBI and US Secret Service have access to the database. (Beware, Big Brother is watching.) This reduces identification turnaround time. If a Boston resident is accused of a federal offense, their information is sent electronically to the FBI in Washington. This takes 2-24 hours. Mailing print cards back and forth took up to 90 days in the past.
The BPD choose Identix and Aware because the companies were FBI-certified. The BPD wanted to be compatible with the FBI's Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS).
"Quality control is up," says Casey. "Files no longer go missing. Everything is more accessible than before. Everything is up-to-date and relevant.
"When an officer arrests a criminal, many decisions have to be made. Having more accurate information lets us make better decisions. Being able to access their file instantly affects bond and prison placement decisions. We can see past history. We can see if they're a flight risk and whether or not we should oppose their application for bond before a trial.
"We've trained more than 400 officers. Before this, very few officers knew how to type. They took to this system like ducks to water. No one resisted because they saw the benefits. It only took us a day to train the detectives to do queries. Comprehensive training took another two days -- but at the end of this, everyone knew the system inside out."
The BPD spent $2.1 million for the entire system and saw a return on the investment after 15 months. Every detective unit in a department has a workstation.
"What we've done is really taking off. Other cities are looking to connect to our system," says Casey. "We're working on a pilot project that will let us provide electronic thumb prints and JPEG compressed mug shots to police departments in other cities."
Texas Gets Out the Big Guns
The Harris County Sheriff's Department in Texas installed a Printrak (Anaheim, CA 714-666-2700) Orion system in 1992. It was the world's first police agency to have real-time identification and use live-scan terminals. They used the terminals for fingerprint entry, using a non-traditional search-and-match technique. They're now in the process of upgrading this system with Printrak's new Series 2000 AFIS. This will give them more of an edge fighting crime.
When the system was installed, it completed a thumbprint search in four minutes -- unheard of at the time. As a result, officers were able to conduct fingerprint searches of all suspects before charges were filed -- something no other police department did.
When they had to make traditional 10-print and latent print searches (on old 10-print paper cards), it still took several hours to find a thumbprint.
The new AFIS system should be running by Spring 1997. It does 10-print and latent searches on a one-million-record database in less than five minutes. The existing database is near capacity with 531,000 records.
The new system will double the database size and totally eliminate paper fingerprint files.
They're planning to expand the application by managing one of the nation's largest jails on the system. The prison processes about 350 inmates every day -- 53 percent already have prior convictions. Live-scan terminals match fingerprint images with database records in underfive minutes. Instant identity checks make it hard for prisoners to be lost in the system.
"Before 1992, many criminals thought it was possible to beat the system by giving a false name," says Major John Matthews, commander of Harris County's Technical Services Bureau. "There was some truth to the rumor because it wasn't possible to conduct fingerprint searches on each and every prisoner.
"When we did our first full database on the AFIS system, we found 18,000 people with multiple identities. One person had 10 aliases. These were cleaned up.
"Having accurate information is very important. We screen for repeat offenders so we can make the right decisions for their case. AFIS puts a lock on the suspect and treatment.
"We're saving the government and taxpayers tremendous amounts of money. The system cost us $2.8 million four years ago. We expect to spend about $3.3 million upgrading it. Even though it's expensive, all the money came from the money we confiscated from criminals."
The new Series 2000 AFIS will be able to handle 10-print cards on demand, eliminating paper files.
Optical storage will be replaced with RAID later to improve reliability. The 11 new Printrak live-scan terminals will have a faster response time, error-detection intelligence, barcode readers and electronic mug-shot capture in the same unit.
The added intelligence provides quality control at the capture point, instead of after the print scan reaches the central processor. Purchasing new terminals costs less than upgrading. The old ones will be distributed to other agencies.
"Imaging technology is a remarkable tool. We're setting ourselves up so that any agency within the district can buy their own live-scan stations and connect to our network," says Matthews. "The United States Secret Service is now looking to connect to the system. The possibilities are endless."
This will manage the entire county's criminal records on one system, in hopes of making it nearly impossible for criminals to escape the now-longer arm of the law.
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