Mug Shots, Fingerprints Ditched By Crime Fighters

Illawarra Mercury

Friday July 18, 2003

By DANIELLE WOOLAGE

GONE are the days of mug shots and messy fingerprint ink.

Instead, computer technology is being used to catch crooks, and Wollongong police are leading the charge.

Wollongong is one of 10 NSW police stations using new facial recognition technology to identify criminals at the touch of a button.

The state-of-the-art PhotoTrac machine takes digital images of people who are charged by police and stores them on a state-wide database.

The digital technology has replaced film cameras and allows police to take a number of images from different angles and also documents scars and distinctive tattoos for easy identification.

PhotoTrac also allows pictures taken during a crime - such as surveillance tapes from banks, hotels or service stations - to be matched against images of known criminals already on the database.

More than 350,000 images are on the PhotoTrac database and about 80,000 photographs are added every year, with NSW Police identifying about 700 matches each month.

Duty officer Craig Sheridan said Wollongong police began using the PhotoTrac technology a month ago, in conjunction with the LiveScan digital fingerprinting system.

The fingerprinting system, installed six months ago, uses lasers to scan perfect prints which are matched against a database.

``The technology has certainly helped (police) identify offenders much more easily," Acting Chief Inspector Sheridan said.

``It is fantastic technology. It has really fast-tracked the process, we can get offenders' histories, photographs and fingerprints in minutes.

``It is leaps and bounds ahead of the old system."

The ``old system" relied on paper and ink for fingerprinting and a film camera and a ``brooch" sheet with the charged person's name, the date and a reference number printed on it for visual identification.

While brooch sheets have gone out the window the ink pad - introduced a century ago - is still used for ``backup" if the LiveScan system breaks down.

Chief Insp Sheridan said Wollongong police would eventually be able to search the PhotoTrac database for matches of images based on eyewitness accounts.