A recent sizeable grant has brought the latest in fingerprinting technology to the three Tri-Town Police Departments, bringing efficiency to a number of aspects of police business, say the three chiefs.
The towns each received a grant from the Massachusetts Sex Offender Registry Board to purchase the latest in digital fingerprinting technology that will make fingerprinting easier to perform, more efficient, less messy, and more reliable.
The advance fingerprint capture devices work entirely differently than the manual inking system. The five fingers of each hand are rolled across a glass plate and scanned and uploaded directly into the system. Under the old manual system, police departments used to send the ink fingerprinted cards thorough the mail to the Plymouth County Sheriff’s Department and to the Mass State Police Department, and these cards were then forwarded to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for county, state, and federal fingerprint checks. The processing time has been slashed considerably and, furthermore, the scanner confirms the quality of the fingerprints before sending them off, something Rochester Police Chief Paul Magee says is an important feature.
“In the old days, we inked people’s fingers,” said Magee. Before, sometimes the inked prints would be sent off and later determined to be incomplete, partial, or smudged, rendering them unusable. “Once you’d fingerprint somebody and you get a bad print, you don’t get another chance…”
Magee said, before, an officer could have a suspect – with additional warrants unknown to the local police department – booked for an arrest of a minor infraction, released under the name given to the police, and probably never found again. But with prints scanned, saved to the database, and sent off electronically to the State Police and Sheriff’s Office, that will no longer happen.
The new technology has also helped out in various other departments, Magee said, including the gun permit department. Since the arrival of the new fingerprinting machine, the backlog of gun permit applications has diminished significantly, said Magee, and the processing of prints for vendors and certain license holders licensed by the Town is more efficient.
The machine was issued mainly for the use of the sex offender registry, with offenders having to re-register with their local police department on an annual basis, which includes photographing the offender and fingerprint matching.
“Printing standards are up to the current level where they should be,” said Magee. “It’s a great piece of equipment. It’s something we could not afford otherwise, with budgets and what they are these days.” Magee called receiving the machine “a big windfall.”
Mattapoisett Police Chief Mary Lyons said gone are the old ink days in Mattapoisett as well.
“It’s a lot cleaner,” said Lyons. “Very clean. So that’s a good thing. And it’s just more efficient.”
Now everything is uploaded from the system, said Lyons, so batches of fingerprints are cleaner, clearer, and easier to read.
“It’s a win-win for everybody,” Lyons said.
Marion Police Chief Lincoln Miller said Marion is also the recipient of the grant to purchase the new fingerprinting equipment.
“We did have an older machine, but it died out so we had to go back to the old ink way of doing things,” said Miller.
The system has not yet been established in Marion, Miller said, but the equipment has arrived and soon he and his officers will receive the required training. The machine will then be put online, and Marion will join Rochester and Mattapoisett in having the latest of fingerprinting technology available.
By Jean Perry
