NCJ Number
175496
Journal
Police Chief Volume: 65 Issue: 9 Dated: September 1998 Pages: 22-29
Date Published
1998
Length
8 pages
Annotation
This article examines the current status of the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS).
Abstract
The ability to transfer fingerprints from one AFIS system to another became a reality earlier this year when a livescan tenprint card went from a local agency to the State's criminal history system, which extracted the suspect's criminal history and sent it back in less than 3 minutes, a task that previously would have taken days or even weeks. What made the difference was the adoption of American National Standards Institute and FBI standards for electronic processing of fingerprints and other personal and demographic information. However, AFIS is not as useful as it might be because there are different systems everywhere; not every system can communicate with every other system and not all can communicate with the FBI system.