West Yorkshire police will carry a fingerprint scanner with which to identify suspects on the street
In action and detective movies, it’s a scene that repeats itself very frequently (if not always). Deployments of agents of the scientific department present at the scene of the crime and intent on detecting fingerprints to compare, once back in the laboratory, with those in the database with computers worthy of a space station.
A job that, very soon, could be carried out directly “in the field”, using smartphones and other portable devices costing a few hundred euros. This, at least, is the feeling you get when you analyze the new technological equipment of British policemen, who by the end of the year will receive a portable fingerprint scanner to identify suspects or undocumented people directly in the street.
How does the new British Police identification system work
From a technical point of view, it is not at all different from the one used by any smartphone equipped with a fingerprint sensor. Even the new system used by the British police uses a high-speed (and accurate) sensor to acquire the fingerprints of the fingers of the hand, but in this case the reader is external.
British police officers will be equipped with a system consisting of a smartphone, a portable reader to be connected through the USB port of the device and an app that will allow to acquire the prints and compare them live with two databases (IDENT1 and IABS) containing the data of 12 million criminals from all over the UK (and not only). The whole operation is expected to take no more than a minute, enabling the men of the British security services to identify with absolute certainty the people taken into custody.
Efficiency and savings
The new technological solution to identify criminals will first be tested by the departments of West Yorkshire Police. If all goes as planned, the fingerprint sensor and app will be adopted by the men of 20 other local departments. The goal, government and British law enforcement sources explain, is to make police officers’ work more efficient, allowing for quick identification of suspects and avoiding trips to police stations that, in most cases, turn out to be completely useless (or almost).