Police Get Power To Check Prints On The Spot
A $250,000 federal COPS grant has allowed the Portland, Ore., Police Bureau to distribute 15 handheld fingerprint devices to police officers and detectives in a pilot program.
The devices are designed to take fingerprints of suspects and remotely compare them to those in an FBI database. If a match is found, the officer instantly obtains such information as the person’s name, date of birth, photo, criminal background, and outstanding warrants.
The system from Identix also checks the fingerprints against those in the Western Identification Network, a database of seven states.
Police and product makers say the device allows law enforcement personnel to bypass a trip to a jail or police precinct to get suspects fingerprinted.
The Palm Pilot-sized device is also valuable for officers who use horses, bicycles, or motorcycles and lack access to a laptop or other PC.
The bureau is hoping to purchase more than 300 additional devices for all of its patrol officers within a year through $650,000 allocated by the Department of Justice.
Portland’s police bureau is currently exploring whether to incorporate a regional database comprising four counties–Multnomah, Washington, Clackamas, and Clark–into the remote fingerprinting system.
Abstracted by the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center(NLECTC) from the Oregonian (04/04/03) P. D2; Bernstein, Maxine.
