SFS Flicks the Switch for IDENT1
21 December 2006
On 4th December 2006 the Scottish Fingerprint Service switched over to the IDENT1 automated fingerprint system, the culmination of several years work by the Police Information Technology Organisation (PITO) and the Scottish Fingerprint Service. IDENT1 represents the amalgamation of finger and palm print data into a single, searchable database for the UK mainland.
The IDENT1 system brings significant benefits to policing and crime detection:
- There is the provision of a single integrated service for police forces in England, Wales and Scotland. Instead of searching crime scene marks against a Scottish database of 360,000 tenprints, the Scottish Fingerprint Service can search against a national database of 6.5 million tenprints, providing the potential for more identification.
- There is also a national database of palm prints, thus allowing the storage and searching of palm prints across the entire UK mainland.
- The Serious Crime Cache - this is a partitioned section of the database, containing 5,000 marks from crimes classified as serious. All tenprints submitted are automatically searched against the unidentified marks in the Serious Crime Cache.
- The Operational Response Database - this is used for special policing situations, such as major incidents, to facilitate capture, storage and searching of marks and prints relating only to a specific policing event.
- And finally, the new system has been designed as a basis for a biometric platform, which makes it possible to search and compare a range of physical features.