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Latent Possibilities
(This article is reprinted from The CJIS Link, Vol. 4, No. 2, Summer 2000, published by U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation. Thanks to SCAFO Past President Bill Leo for sharing this information.) At about 9 p.m. on April 23, 1991, 87--year--old Maude Hinds heard glass breaking at the entrance to her Boston residence. Armed with a small hammer and a flashlight, Maude went downstairs to investigate the noise and surprised a burglar who had broken a window. The intruder attacked and strangled the elderly woman. Then he ransacked her apartment before fleeing the scene. Patrolman Bob Silva was one of the investigators from the Boston Police Department who found the bloody shards of glass on the porch. In reconstructing the events that led to the murder, the investigators surmised that the burglar had smashed a window that had a broken sash and the window had fallen on the suspect's hands causing bleeding. Mr. Silva lifted six highly readable prints from the blood on the glass and submitted the prints to the FBI in May 1991. In August, the FBI responded with a no--hit message. Over the intervening years, Bob Silva refused to let the matter rest, continuing to submit the latent prints to other states. New York, New Jersey, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont all searched the prints and came up empty. Finally, in March 2000, latent print examiner Dennis LeBlanc submitted the prints again to the FBI, this time through the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS). On Saturday, March 8, Sergeant Bob Silva was at home when he received the news for which he had been waiting for nearly 9 years. There had been a hit in the Maude Hinds case. A few days later, a 28--year--old male was taken into custody and charged with murder. Solving crimes that occurred many years ago has become a somewhat commonplace occurrence since IAFIS became operational on July 28, 1999. Since then, the FBI's latent fingerprint experts have been enthusiastically proving the value of the new technology for latent print searches by running crime scene prints for the FBI's case investigations and other law enforcement agencies. Assistant Director Donald M. Kerr, head of the FBI's Laboratory Division, recently announced that more hits had resulted from 6 months of running latent prints through IAFIS than had been logged in ten years of processing on the old system. Welcome as this news was, the CJIS Division's goal has been to make the crime--solving potential of IAFIS available to latent fingerprint examiners nationwide. By November 1999, the System's capability had been expanded to allow state or federal agencies to initiate latent searches of IAFIS independently without intervention of the FBI's Laboratory Division. Now the focus is on supporting and encouraging law enforcement's efforts to access this new capability. In order to take advantage of the latent search functionality, state and federal agencies must meet two requirements. Connect to the CJIS Wide Area Network (CJISWAN). The FBI provides a single telecommunications line to each state, the CJISWAN. Each state is responsible for developing the internal infrastructure needed to transmit latent searches from local agencies or crime labs through the state system to the FBI for processing. Acquire an IAFIS compatible latent workstation. Until commercial workstations are readily available, the FBI is offering two latent software packages free of charge. These two packages are the Remote Fingerprint Editing Software (RFES) and the Universal Latent Workstation (ULW). Each of the software packages can operate on any personal computer that meets the specified hardware requirements. The RFES software, which was developed by Lockheed Martin, operates on the Microsoft Windows NT environment and requires a Pentium II (or later) CPU. It was developed on the assumption that the remote latent examiners would need full access to all of the advanced image enhancement tools developed by the FBI for IAFIS. RFES requires considerably more Random Access Memory (192 megabytes) than the ULW (96 megabytes), but it does not require any of the commercial packages for latent case management and image enhancement that are required by the ULW. Latent fingerprint images encoded on a RFES workstation can only be searched against IAFIS. The ULW was developed by the Mitretek Corporation in cooperation with the FBI's Advanced Technologies Unit in an ongoing effort to improve latent search interoperability, which will ultimately allow a ULW to search any AFIS. The ULW software can be installed on any personal computer with a Pentium class (or better) processor. It operates on Windows 95,98, or NT and is intended to be used in conjunction with one of the commercial software packages for latent case management. Currently, four states are submitting latent prints electronically to IAFIS -- Illinois, Texas, New York, and Wisconsin. The Boston Police Department is one of the first city agencies to pilot the electronic latent print program. The CJIS Division has assigned regional representatives to provide copies of the latent software packages and assist agencies in planning connectivity. For more information, contact one of the following: Northeast Region -- Linda Sue Click, 304--625--2767; Southern Region -- Kimberly Smith, 304--625--2761; North Central Region -- Todd Commodore, 304--625--2803; Western Region -- Stephanie Hitt, 304--625--2753.
This article was printed in “THE PRINT” |