Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Sheriff’s office gets high-tech palmprint ID from Motorola

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2003 00:11:34 -0400

Sheriff’s office gets high-tech palmprint ID from Motorola

Published Wednesday, October 15, 2003

by Brian Bandell

The Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office has a new way to catch crooks
red-handed after installing a palmprint identification system designed by
Motorola.

The Omnitrak AFTS/Palmprint Identification and Livescan electronic
scanning technologies allow officers to scan suspects’ palms – much like
they do with fingers – and check them against a database of other
palmprints to help solve crimes. Over 40 percent of the more than 4,000
cases involving latent prints the sheriff’s office processes every year involve
palmprints.

It is the second agency in the state, along with the Miami-Dade County
Sheriff’s Office, to implement such technology.

“The deployment of this system will increase the number of people that we
are able to identify and the number of cases that we are able to solve,” said
Palm Beach County Sheriff Edward Bieluch. “The new technology will
streamline our operations and allow us to be more productive. Being more
productive means that we are able to protect the public more effectively,
which is one of the most important things we do.”

The new system cost about $1 million to install, but it will save the
department time and money in the long run, said Mark McDonald,
ID/latent manager, at the sheriff’s office. Palmprints used to be recorded
on cards that would be filed away. Only one card would be kept per
person, no matter how many times they’d been arrested. Motorola’s new
system stores the palmprints digitally, saving space, allowing multiple prints
per person and allowing for faster searches.

“It just makes sense,” McDonald said. “When you consider that
approximately one-third of all crime scenes in the U.S. involve latent
palmprints, we are able to identify an immediate return on our investment. I
think we can expect to see a growing number of law enforcement agencies
throughout the country implementing palmprint systems for their
jurisdictions.”

The sheriff’s office plans to upgrade to Motorola’s full Omnitrak system,
which would further update fingerprint identification, in 2004. The
department wants its system ready before the Florida Department of Law
Enforcemnt updates its scanning system by December 2005, McDonald
said.

http://www.bocaratonnews.com/index.php?src=news&category=LOCAL%20NEWS&prid=6536

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