Police road-test hand-held fingerprint
scannerNov 22 9:06 AM US/Eastern
Police in England and Wales have begun trialling hand-held
electronic fingerprint readers on motorists, the latest piece of
new high-tech equipment being wielded in the fight against
crime.
Police say the device could save vast amounts of time and resources
by identifying suspects on the spot rather than taking them to a
police station -- should their prints be on the national
database.
The scanner allows officers to search the 6.5 million fingerprints
held on record and should produce a result within five
minutes.
Estimates suggest it could save police more than 2.2 million pounds
(4.2 million dollars, 3.3 million euros) per year.
The pilot scheme is being tested by traffic police in Luton,
northwest of London, and is voluntary because under existing law,
members of the public are not obliged to give their fingerprints at
the roadside.
"This trial represents an important step forward in our commitment
to ensuring we have an effective and efficient police service fully
equipped for the challenges of modern policing," said police
minister Tony McNulty on Wednesday.
"The new technology will speed up the time it takes for police to
identify individuals at the roadside, enabling them to spend more
time on the frontline and reducing any inconvenience for innocent
members of the public."
Argentine policeman Juan Vucetich is credited with making the first
positive criminal fingerprint identification in 1892.
The new device is the latest piece of sophisticated technology at
the disposal of police officers.
The Home Office interior ministry says Britain leads the world in
using DNA to identify criminals, with more than 3.4 million
profiles on the national DNA database, representing 5.2 percent of
the population.
The Police National Computer now holds extensive data on criminals,
vehicles and property, accessible in seconds at more than 30,000
terminals.
And police say they are world leaders in automatic number plate
recognition, invented in Britain and used to track the movement of
suspects and their vehicles.
But a report by the Surveillance Studies Network academic group
published earlier this month warned that Britain was becoming a
"surveillance society" where security cameras, credit card analysis
and travel movements were used to track people's lives minute by
minute.
There are up to 4.2 million closed-circuit television cameras --
about one for every 14 people or nearly 10 percent of those around
the world.
Every person is caught on camera about 300 times each day.