Did you ever stop some guy in a routine traffic stop and sense that “something just ain’t right with this guy”? If he had valid ID and you didn’t have a reason to drag him down to the station then you had to let him go. Well your gut feelings might be getting some help these days.
Mobile fingerprint units that allow you to obtain a persons thumb and fingerprints right at the road side, upload them instantaneously (Wi-Fi enabled) to a database containing up to 650,000 prints and have an answer back two to several minutes. Any outstanding warrants, felony charges, DUIs or terrorist watch list items come back to you guiding your course of action. These units are being used in the UK and Europe and are now beginning to get attention in the US.
Surprise, Surprise
Primarily these units have been used in the past by the FBI and the U.S. military in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines and other countries. The following items from a recent Washington Post article (see citation below) indicate that beside the routine traffic violation, child payment slackers, etc. you might expect surprising things have turned up while using these units.
- A guy fleeing a checkpoint in Tirkit, Iraq claimed to be a poor dirt farmer but for some reason had eleven felony arrests in the U.S., one a deadly weapons assault.
- Then there was the suspected Somalian militant fleeing Somalia that had an arrest on drug charges in New Jersey.
- Another man claiming to be in Afghanistan to learn the ancient art of falconry who just happened to have been turned away from the Orlando airport in August of 2001 by Immigration Agents who thought he might overstay his visa.
Isolated Events
You might be inclined to say well these are isolated individuals but you would be wrong. The arrests span the country from coast to coast, from Utah to Chicago. Most of the individuals identified are young males coming to this country to study. Somehow becoming disillusioned by U.S. society and culture and returning to these countries to join militant groups and share their acquired knowledge of Western society. Another example stems from an FBI report of the fingerprinting of 3,800 fighters on the Iran-Iraq border who are members of MEK, a group devoted to the overthrow of the Iranian government. Over 40 of these individuals had prior arrest records that showed up in the FBI database.
Foreign fighters captured by the military after a long series of airstrikes in one section of Afghanistan were fingerprinted by the FBI. To their surprise they found that one out of every one hundred foreign fighters was already in the FBI Database. Many for drunken driving, passing faked checks, theft, and many for traffic violations.
Closer to Home
Mesa Arizona Police have taken fingerprint to their streets to identify drunk drivers and speeder. In one recent stop, on the spot fingerprinting identified a guy who had used ten aliases in separate drunken-driving cases. Different names, fake driving licenses and you can have several DUI cases going all at the same time. For this guy his luck ran out; he now doing 12 years in state prison. Columbus, Ohio Police are using 40 cellular- enabled hand-held units to identify suspect against the city’s own 250,000 fingerprint database. The City of Ceres, California are using mobile units to identify people in cases where a warrant cannot be served because the individual has adopted a fake name to avoid being served with the warrant. The technology that allowed business to communicate and operate faster has also increased the ease and speed with which someone can obtain a fake drivers license, passport or other ID.
Salt Lake City, Utah law enforcement has adopted an even further advanced system called IBIS which is capable of identifying not only fingerprints but also provides facial recognition mug shot data on a single hand-held unit. Many departments in England and Australia also use mobile fingerprint units as well as the Swiss Federal Police.
How Does It Work
The suspect’s finger is placed on the scanner plate and the scanner looks for unique patterns of distinctions called minutiae. The pattern is then encrypted and transmitted via a wireless system similar to your cell phone to a database at a remote location. That database can be a local city or state database of known offender, the FBI’s IAFIS or, if required, to other foreign databases including Interpol. Once received the scan is automatically read into a computer and matched against every file in the data base. If a match is found then this the pertinent data on that suspect is wirelessly transmitted back to the field officer who submitted the data. All of this is happening in real time, no lost time transporting a suspect to the station, going thru fingerprinting etc. If a match is found right away an answer is obtained in minutes. Searching several databases or the larger databases can take longer but still be managed in the field. In many cases an arrest can be made on the spot thus removing another criminal from the streets.
Who Makes it
SAGEM Morpho has developed RapID™, a handheld biometric terminal developed for use in hostile environments. Fulcrum/NITGEN markets the PIV-Certified Finger scanner, Cogent Systems markets a variety of products as dose other manufacturers. These units are pricy ranging$6-7,000 to upwards of $45,000. It is important for a Department to carefully determine where and on whom this type of equipment will be used. Who will be trained to operate it and what are the costs of running it and future maintenance before a decision to purchase a unit can be made.
The Civil Liberties issue
As always there is the civil liberties protection issue with remote fingerprinting. The technology is needed to more efficiently manage situations in the field and to protect officers from dangerous criminals using false identities. However, each department must develop and maintain a strict policy of when and how the technology will be applied.
