L.A. Seeks Staff To Step Up Analysis Of Fingerprints
Los Angeles police officials have voted to add 12 finger print technician jobs and reassign six detectives to alleviate a backlog of unprocessed fingerprints. The department has unprocessed fingerprints in over 6,000 unsolved homicide cases.
The LAPD established a unit last year to investigate cold cases from 1931 to 1985. There are additional unprocessed fingerprints from 4,000 unsolved cases from 1985 onward. Officials want the fingerprints processed for comparison to the 44 million fingerprints stored in the federal database.
“The work [the database] generates could potentially be huge,” notes Det. Dave Lambkin of the LAPD’s Robbery-Homicide division.
Spurring the Board of Police Commissioners decision to proceed with the initiative was the discovery that the FBI print database was able to match a sample of 52 fingerprints to 19 percent of unsolved murder cases.
Abstracted by the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center(NLECTC) from the Los Angeles Times (03/26/03) P. 2-4; Blankstein, Andrew.
