FBI's FINGERPRINT DATABASE WILL AID LAW ENFORCEMENT

With a little extra technology from the FBI, law enforcement officials in Missouri soon will keep more criminals behind bars.

The FBI this week officially dedicated its new $640 million electronic database of fingerprints at its Criminal Justice Information Services center in Clarksburg, W.Va. The goal of the system is to shorten the length of time it takes to positively identify individuals who are under arrest.

Before the new system was available, fugitives and repeat offenders often were released by judges who had no criminal history to peruse before bail hearings, FBI Director Louis Freeh said.

Such scenarios happen too often, said Bob McCoy, who is in charge of the scientific investigation unit of the Cape Girardeau Police Department.

This week the police received identification from the FBI on a suspect arrested six weeks ago, McCoy said. Based on the person's fingerprints, police now will have to arrest him again, he said.

"If we get a fictitious name or date of birth, it makes it harder for us," McCoy said. "The person is probably going to be released unless he's already in the system."

A person becomes a part of state and federal fingerprint records once he is arrested. Police have a suspect roll his fingers over an ink pad and press all 10 fingers on two cards. One card goes to the Missouri Highway Patrol and the other to the FBI, McCoy said.

False identities make the process longer, he said.

If the SEMO Regional Crime Lab can't match fingerprints from a crime scene, the prints are sent to the Highway Patrol in Jefferson City, said Andy Wagoner, a forensic scientist. The lab usually gets a response in three weeks, he said.

The FBI's new Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System has been late arriving, too. It was supposed to start operating in November 1997. That was delayed when Congress and an advisory board asked for additional functions for the system.

When it is working, a match can be made in 24 hours, said FBI spokesman Steve Fischer.

The extra time needed to create an operating system to integrate three or four electronic fingerprint systems probably added to the delay, said Capt. Bob Gartner, director of the Highway Patrol's Division of Criminal Records and Identification.

"When these companies developed their systems, they didn't talk to one another," Gartner said. "So they had to come up with something that could deal with the different systems law enforcement uses."

Since 1990, the state has operated with the FBI's Automated Fingerprint Identification System, or AFIS, Gartner said. After taking over a year to update its AFIS, Missouri should be ready to plug into the FBI's new fingerprint system early in 2000, he said.

"Besides that, we've had to rewrite our criminal histories database, which has been a three-year process," Gartner said.

Currently, 15 states are online with the FBI's new system: Alaska, Arizona, California, Florida, Maine, New Mexico, South Carolina, North Carolina, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Georgia, Mississippi and Massachusetts.

All 50 states are expected to be connected within the next few years.

Cost is the reason behind the slow spread of fingerprinting technology, Gartner said. A police department would spend $80,000 for a live scan system in which a suspect rolls his fingers across a glass plate, allowing the prints to be recorded photographically on a computer.

A less-expensive card scan system also exists. For about $20,000, it lets police send ink prints through a machine similar to a fax, Gartner said.

The FBI receives about 50,000 fingerprints a day, about half of them for criminal matters. About 10 percent, or 5,000, are for people being arrested for the first time, so the FBI has no prior data on them.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.