Elementary, Watson: Scan A Palm, Find A Clue
Because many of the prints found at crime scenes are from suspects’ palms rather than their fingers, the New York Police Department this year began having prisoners place their entire hands over the scanner that captures their palm prints, rather than just their fingerprints.
The department has collected 100,000 palm prints so far, and next month it will be able to do computerized matches of the prints in this database.
So far, about 30 law enforcement agencies around the country have built their own palm databases, including the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area, Miami, Palm Beach, Philadelphia, and Indianapolis.
Thus far, Indianapolis has come up with a match in 15 percent of its palm searches, according to statistics from its system vendor Identix.
The FBI is also currently assessing three systems for potentially creating a national palm-print repository. Palm prints have been traditionally taken by ink, but palm-print databases is expected to increase matches exponentially.
The Manhattan police academy has installed palm scanners that walk officers through the print collection process, and alert them of bad prints. The New York Police Department will be one of the first to use an inkless scanner to record prints directly into the database, notes James Simon of the NYPD’s Central Records Division.
Abstracted by the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center(NLECTC) from the New York Times (11/21/03) P. A1; Dewan, Shaila K.