Congratulations! Your department has an automated biometric identification system (ABIS), which means you can get started.
You are one step closer to finding that suspect and/or solving a case. All when time is of the essence.
Now that you have your ABIS, it is time to discover the main features. Within an ABIS, the primary functionality is using fingerprint and facial images for identification. To find a suspect that has been booked due to a crime, officers can match suspect biometrics against biometric templates to verify his or her identity. Police can then see if that suspect has a criminal record, or if they don’t, they can enroll their biometric data into their database for future security reasons.
Some of the lesser-known features that you should know about may include ease of configuration, high availability, and fault tolerance, multi-modal capability, web-services architecture, it is highly scalable and more. These are still important because they are vital to the main goal, solving crime quickly and accurately.
Using an ABIS in the community is particularly useful for speed and accuracy as police search for suspects, could help find someone’s identity (without proper identification) in an accident, or help an employer screen in local schools or businesses.
Criminals tend to act locally.
That is, they break laws repeatedly in the same geographic location. A local ABIS can focus on these offenders without the additional burden of searching state, regional, or national systems. Let us say a robbery takes place in a rural neighborhood. Once the police complete the routine crime scene work (I.e., taking pictures of the crime scene, lifting prints, etc.) they send the latent prints it out to the state lab> Serving large areas, state labs generally require a long time to process any non-critical (i.e. non–murder) prints. The problem with long processing times is that it lessens the chance of catching the criminal/suspect when time is of the essence.
Alleviate the long wait time, by implementing an ABIS.
Your organization can process enrollments locally and get the response in minutes versus months. It will save you time and could impact the security and safety of your community. When the results come back quickly and accurately from the implementation of an ABIS, it could get this wanted criminal off the streets.
Sometimes an ABIS is needed to identify someone without proper identification.
Another example is an accident victim without any identification. With a local ABIS police have the opportunity to take the victim’s prints and match them to the ABIS database. Even if said person has a criminal history) this method could be used to simply ID the person to let family or loved ones know that he or she is safe. On the other hand, this person will now be in the system to catch if a crime is ever committed in the future.
Lastly, an ABIS could also be used for employers of schools and local businesses.
If these schools or local businesses wanted to get fingerprints for background checks, they could take them to the local police station, have them enrolled into the system. The officers would then check to see if the prints matched any current record.
Therefore, if the fingerprints come back clean then they would be hired to work at the local school or business because of the clean record. If not, the results can be reviewed, and the business can make a fully informed employment decision.
Although an ABIS is the most useful in finding criminal suspects, it can help the community by running prints for identification, and employers could screen for schools and local businesses.
All these instances drive home the point of keeping the community safe and secure. Whatever your need is with an ABIS, it can be particularly useful with its many features and even help your community.
Contact Aware to learn about their deployments of mobile biometrics for law enforcement.