Identification

New South Wales hails mobile fingerprint capturing device

By Crystal :Low | 15 July 2009

The New South Wales police has hailed the advantages of a mobile finger print capturing and forwarding device it introduced earlier this year.

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The $6.1 million Field Identification Project consists of some 500 devices which make it nearly impossible for shoplifters, petty thieves and protesters to weasel out of fines and court appearances.

Captured fingerprints are uploaded to the National Automated Fingerprint Identification System (NAFIS) using embedded wireless cards, and cross-checked with recorded fingerprints to provide officers with on-the-spot identity match.

According to Superintendent Darryl Tuck, the devices take 90 seconds to provide feedback on a fingerprint.

He cites increased productivity as one of the benefits of having deployed these devices. “The devices keep police officers in the field longer. They’re not coming back to police stations to do paperwork.”

The units, roughly the size of a portable home phone, are strapped onto officers’ arms or used on a hand-held mounted bracket to maintain safe distance between police and suspects.

As the device uses a Next G connection provided by Telstra to connect to the network, it is not currently able to work offline, something Tuck said he hopes to change in the future.

Next in the pipeline: “We want to move to bar coding and electronic registering of exhibits in the field, so that from cradle to grave, from the field all the way through to the court system until the matter is completed, the case will be tracked and logged very easily with minimum manual intervention. This would enable safe and rapid auditing, and being able to track the case through its entire life cycle.”

The above improvement would be based on technology such as barcode readers, tough tablets or tough notebooks, and digital imaging.