Snagging a perpetrator just became a lot faster in Canyon and the surrounding area.
At their July 1 meeting, the Canyon City Commission passed an interlocal agreement with the City of Amarillo to approve the use of a process using a dual submit process for fingerprint entry designed to speed up the AFIS system of getting data out to Amarillo and the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), who work together to fight crime.
AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System) is a law enforcement tool used to match fingerprints to people, explained Canyon Police Chief Steve Brush. It automates the otherwise time-intensive task of manually processing fingerprints taken from crime suspects or crime scenes. It is a powerful and effective investigative tool capable of quickly sifting through large fingerprint databases to produce a relevant candidate list of potential matches, according to information provided by the City of Canyon.
Brush said that it will help them identify latent print from a crime scene and eliminate a lot of time searching.
In 2006, the Texas Panhandle implemented its first regional AFIS program. That project resulted in the creation of a regional fingerprint database, built specifically to house prints taken from individuals who had been arrested in the Panhandle or lifted from crime scenes in the region. Additionally, all 26 county sheriff’s offices received an AFIS workstation.
Every jail in the region has a live scan device that’s used to collect prints and photographs from suspects at the time they’re being booked. Those prints are then submitted to the state’s database, maintained by the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS). Simultaneously, they’re being deposited into the regional AFIS database housed at the City of Amarillo.
The benefit of using a dual submit process for fingerprint entry is that it’s much faster to search for a match on the regional database than it is to search the DPS database. AFIS has the ability to do both, but while the regional database holds around 450,000 sets of prints, the DPS database houses many million more. There’s a pretty good chance that when latent prints are found on a Panhandle crime scene that someone from the region committed the crime. And, if it wasn’t their first offense, odds are, their prints are already in the regional database, authorities said.
With regard to the purpose of this item, SPEX Forensics, located in Edison, NJ, is the sole proprietor of the PrintQuest AFIS system on which the regional AFIS database and the AFIS workstations rely. PRPC has been working with SPEX since the initial installation of the region’s AFIS system in 2005.
In addition to Canyon and Amarillo, Borger, Childress, Dalhart, Dumas Pampa are now part of the system. SPEX Forensics, a division of HORIBA Instruments Inc., manufactures and sells certain forensic equipment utilized by law enforcement.
This article originally appeared on Amarillo Globe-News: Fingerprint system helping Canyon and area towns catch bad guys faster
Reporting by Nell Williams, Amarillo Globe-News / Amarillo Globe-News
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