Police in Stockton, Calif., would like to expand the use of a mobile fingerprint identification system supplied by Cogent Systems [COGT] that they began using earlier this year under a crime fighting pilot project, says an official with the city’s police department.
Initially Stockton police were primarily using Cogent’s BlueCheck portable fingerprint scanner over 200 times a day to identity jail inmates, Tom Hennig, the police department’s program manager for the pilot projects, says at the recent Biometric Consortium Conference in Baltimore. Only a handful of the devices have been used with patrol cars but the police expect to quickly ramp up use of the BlueCheck devices so that they are being used 100 times a day in the field, Hennig says.
In a 30 day period “we’ve made eight significant arrests based on the BlueCheck device,” Hennig says.
“The demand for the ID device is driven by the police officers,” Hennig says. “They were the number one advocate once they saw it working.”
For now the fingerprint scanners are being used to initiate searches against a local Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) database. If a suspect generates a match against a previous booking, then that information comes back to the police officer along with a current mug shot.
Hennig says that Stockton is beset with a high crime rate and the police are willing to use technology to their advantage. Some of the drivers behind the need for a mobile identification system are: There are 2,800 documented gang members in the city; over 2,900 paroled criminals in the area with 400 at large at any one time; the city has the second highest rate of violent crime in California; Stockton is the second worst city behind Las Vegas for stolen vehicles in the country; a large drug problem; and a large population of undocumented aliens that move through the area.
Frequently police are confronted with suspicious individuals who have no identification and usually give out a false name, making difficult to know who they are dealing with, Hennig says. In a recent situation, a man was riding a bike around in a local park at night, not doing anything wrong but just “meandering around where he shouldn’t have been,” Hennig says. He had no identification on him, Hennig says. The police who stopped the man used BlueCheck to search his fingerprints against the local AFIS database and discovered that he was wanted for jumping bail.
“He was voiding jail for some time because no one could figure out who he was,” Hennig says. “Now he’s in jail.”
Police in Stockton are now looking to do more with BlueCheck. One upgrade is to take the system from client-based to Web-based, Hennig says. Another is getting the installation time to less than five minutes.
“We want to make it simpler for the officers,” he says.
The police would also like to have BlueCheck in every patrol car, at every courtroom exit and at every entrance to a police station, Hennig says. They also want to be able to expand their database searches to include other localities in California that have AFIS systems, including the state itself, he says.
“And anytime the fed let us start sending those we don’t catch in California to the single prints out here we’d love to do that,” Hennig says.
The police also would like to consider enrolling fingerprints into the local AFIS using BlueCheck, Hennig says.
“Some of these folks, when we’re doing field interviews, that may be the only time we can pick up a print or two,” he says. “We might as well keep it and do something with it later if we ever get the opportunity.”
Other goals include expanding the use of the device by correctional officers for inmate tracking so that when inmates go from one location to another their identification can be verified with their mug shot, Hennig says. The police are also doing training for Weapons of Mass Destruction scenarios where BlueCheck would be used to register responders who are allowed inside the command post area, he says.
Hennig says that BlueCheck was selected because it’s mobile, has a universal battery, is simple to use, has less than a one minute response, allows secure transactions over the local Internet, and works with the existing infrastructure. The device also has a seamless interface with the local AFIS, which was also supplied by Cogent, he says. There are over 500,000 records in the local AFIS, he notes.
Since Stockton went live with BlueCheck other local law enforcement agencies have also acquired the system, including the City and County of Los Angeles, Fresno, and San Jose, Hennig says.