By Kathryn Gregory
The Charleston Gazette
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — West Virginia State Police are leaving ink and paper behind when it comes to fingerprinting.
The State Police will be installing new Livescan systems into each of their 60 detachments around the state.
The Livescan systems are part of the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, or AFIS, and allow police departments to take digitized pictures of fingerprints and store them in one computer base.
AFIS not only stores abundant amounts of prints -- more than a million prints in the state alone -- but can also copy prints into the system.
The AFIS Livescan works much like a photocopier. Fingers are rolled across a platform and read by the computer.
“It takes a full 180-degree scan of the finger and converts that 3-D image into standard computer units of zeros and ones,” said Stephen King, latent print section head supervisor for the West Virginia State Police. “The image stays in its digital format until it’s called up, then it’s converted into a print that you’d recognize with actual ridges and lines.”
Most of the images within the State Police’s AFIS are ink prints that have been scanned into a card reader and digitized like the other prints, King said.
A new Livescan system will be put into every detachment around the state.
“The money from that came from the Purdue Pharma lawsuit. Each Livescan cost about $40,000,” said Lt. Michael Corsaro, director of the criminal investigations system.
The state received $44 million from the drug company in June after three of its current and former executives agreed to pay for misleading the public about the risk of addiction to its drug OxyContin.
The most important thing that AFIS Livescan identifies is the latent print.
“For over 100 years, one of the most sought after pieces of forensic evidence has been the latent print -- the hidden residue left when bare fingers, hands, toes and feet come in contact with a surface. If properly recovered, the latent print can potentially lead a criminal investigator to the perpetrator of a crime and later be used as strong evidence against that individual at trial,” according to the State Police Web site.
West Virginia was the last state to get AFIS in 2000 because the system was so expensive.
“We were using state money for other things, but it was getting very hard to communicate with other states without the system,” King said.
The state has had the system for more than eight years, but recently purchased a new, updated system.
The money for the new AFIS system came from appropriations from the Legislature, Corsaro said.
The new system has increased functions and will now allow State Police to search and store palm prints, along with fingerprints.
“Many of the State Police have come to depend on the system. It doesn’t solve cases for the officers, but it gives them potential leads on crimes,” King said.
“Television has a very romantic view of crime scenes and forensics. They rarely portray what we do technically. They portray AFIS as what people depend on to solve the crime, when actually it’s the people who decipher the information who solve the crime,” he said.
There are two different types of print examiners. The first is the latent print examiner, who works for the forensic side of the lab. The second is the fingerprint technicians who work for the record-keeping division.
People are most familiar with the forensic side of AFIS, which is what people see on “CSI” and other crime shows, King said.
“No system works like it does on TV. We can rapidly search millions of latent print images against prints we have from a crime scene and AFIS will pull up multiple results that closely match the print,” King said.
“We have trained forensic examiners who will look at the fingerprints side by side and will make the call about which print actually matches,” he said.
State Police could turn in a latent print to the state forensic crime lab that they found at the scene of a crime.
“We can search AFIS for that print and see if a match is found. If it is, it’s not indicative of guilt. It just means that a person was present and has a lot of explaining to do to the police, but it doesn’t prove they’re guilty,” King said.
Many times, crime lab technicians will put a latent print into the system that doesn’t get an identification hit right away. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing for the state.
“The forensic advantage to that is that if we have a latent print that we haven’t identified, it can be stored in the system and then actually scanned against all the incoming prints,” King said. “The latent print is orbiting in the database looking for a match. Eventually, it will link up to a print that comes in at a later date.”
State Police eventually would like to have troopers be able to access the AFIS system from their vehicles.
“That’s not in the plans anytime soon,” said Lt. Jane Hudson, who works with Corsaro in the criminal investigations unit. “But access in vehicles is ultimately the way we want to go.”
Copyright 2009 The Charleston Gazette