|
|
|
New standards enable nationwide searches (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.) For the first time in history, it is possible for law enforcement agencies to lift fingerprints at a crime scene, encode them at the local agency, and without further encoding, forward the prints electronically to other agencies and through the state identification bureaus to the FBI for identification searches. Electronic searching of latent prints is not a new technology. The breakthrough lies in the ability to encode the latent fingerprint data one time and then forward the prints for searches against any other database, including the FBI's IAFIS, that has the newly developed, standard interface. For the past several years, when an agency has purchased an Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS), the equipment has included a latent search ability. However, the AFIS vendors have viewed their fingerprint image characterization requirements as proprietary information. This means that the placement of minutiae, which minutiae to include in the search, and neighborhood data such as ridge counts and curvature were all vendor specific. A single latent workstation could not connect to more than one vendor's AFIS. Searching multiple AFIS's required redundant encoding on multiple workstations using different encoding rules for each AFIS -- a costly and complex operation. The lack of system interoperability was clearly disadvantageous for agencies using the AFISs. In February 1998, responding to requests from system users, the AFIS vendors began collaborating with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the FBI in a standardization effort to improve remote latent search interoperability. Over the past two and one--half years, all of the major AFIS vendors have been working on developing a standard interface, and considerable progress has been made. Concurrently, the CJIS Division has been developing a software application called a Universal Latent Workstation (ULW) that would allow a latent expert to encode and search a crime scene print locally and then forward that same encoding to any other AFIS that had incorporated the new American National Standards Institute (ANSI)/NIST latent interface. The ULW has been installed in several agencies throughout the Nation where it is being tested and evaluated. In an early pilot test of the new standard, the Massachusetts State Police made the first remote latent search identification at the FBI on a case that clearly demonstrated both the need and potential of improved interoperability. Using the ULW, they translated a latent tracing from their NEC system into an ANSI/NIST feature set that could be searched at the FBI. IAFIS automatically selected possible matching prints and returned them to the submitting agency for review. There, a latent print expert was able to identify a suspect in a 28--year--old homicide case. The man had been in and out of prison most of his life and had been fingerprinted in at least six states. This long overdue identification allowed officials to close a very cold case. Designed to run on personal computers, the ULW software is available free from the FBI. For more information about the ULW, contact Tom Hopper, Advanced Technologies Unit, 202--324--3506.
This article was printed in “THE PRINT” |