A new technology allows detectives throughout King County to match palm prints to suspects to help solve crimes.
King County’s new generation Automated Fingerprint Identification System, also known as AFIS, is now part of crime-scene investigations.
The new AFIS, a MorphoTrak product, can match suspects through fingerprints and palm prints and is already proving to be a success, according to a King County Sheriff’s Office media release.
Examiners can now give detectives new suspect names in homicide, rape, and kidnapping cases, among others. Some cases are from the 1980s and had grown
cold for years, with no leads. Now it’s up to detectives to use that information to gather enough evidence so charges can be filed.
“Not every murder investigation contains the possibility of DNA technology” said veteran sheriff’s office homicide detective Scott Tompkins. “The new Palm AFIS database has allowed us to develop leads in homicide cases that were at a dead end before.”
AFIS works by having a computer compare a fingerprint lifted at a crime scene to a database of over 690,000 sets of fingerprints in the local system. Once a match is made, an examiner manually confirms the “hit.”
But until now, the AFIS computer couldn’t do a search for palm prints left at a crime scene by a suspect. Only prints from the tips of fingers could be used.
So unless there was a known suspect where an examiner could manually compare the palm print to what was in the database, detectives were out of luck.
And suspects would go free.
Now, an examiner can take a fraction of a latent palm print, search it through the new AFIS, and perhaps get a hit on a known palm print. The examiner can now give the suspect name to the detective. And palm prints make up about 30 percent of the prints lifted at a crime scene.
The number of suspect identifications will continue to increase as more palm prints and fingerprints are added to the database. More crimes will be solved through the use of this new technology, contributing to officer and public safety.
Under administration of the King County Sheriff’s Office, the AFIS Program serves all law enforcement agencies within the county. The program’s criminal fingerprint technology and operations are funded by a property tax levy, renewed by the voters in 2006 and set to expire in 2012. A proposition to renew the levy will appear on the ballot in 2012.
Talk to us
Please share your story tips by emailing editor@kentreporter.com.
To share your opinion for publication, submit a letter through our website https://www.kentreporter.com/submit-letter/. Include your name, address and daytime phone number. (We’ll only publish your name and hometown.) Please keep letters to 300 words or less.
