Police officers now have crime-fighting facts on their fingertips, thanks to the Fingerprint Analysis and Crime Tracing System (FACTS) developed by CMC Ltd.
State police forces in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Jammu and Kashmir and Kerala, and the Hyderabad city police, are already using this system to track criminals. Delhi Police will be the latest addition to the list of FACTS users.
Fingerprints have been used for identification by law-enforcing departments for over a century. But the manual system of fingerprint identification has not been able to keep pace with the rate of increase in fingerprints on record and the increasing number of queries that have to be answered everyday. Long search time and low positive identification rates (poor tracing of criminals) are the major problems in the manual system.
FACTS, an advanced automatic fingerprint identification system, helps law enforcement agencies to identify criminals using fingerprints. The system enables easy storage and retrieval of large volumes of fingerprints in short time frames.
"The system helps the law enforcement agencies in personal identification searches, where on-site as well as ten fingerprints of a person are available and are used for positive identification using the fingerprint database, as in case of arrested criminals," said Ajay Prakash, country manager for ASDS-FACTS, CMC Ltd.
The system promises 99 per cent accuracy in ten finger prints and about 70 per cent accuracy in case of on-site prints.
Prakash said the cost of the system would vary from Rs 75 lakh to Rs 3 crore depending on the size of the installation.
Andhra Pradesh is the biggest running site for the system with over 2.5 lakh fingerprints stored and connectivity extended to all district headquarters with a universal query facility.
The proposed POLNET, a project to interconnect all the police stations in the country and link them with various agencies like the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), is expected to use FACTS. "If POLNET becomes functional, then FACTS will be really useful One will be able to conduct nationwide searches," Prakash pointed out.
Internationally, FACTS is installed at Mauritius Police, Mauritius.
The need for a computer-based automatic fingerprint identification system was felt by police departments and fingerprints identification officers in India in the early '80s itself.
The cost of importing such specialised systems available abroad is very high. Moreover, manufacturers of such imported systems were not ready for a technology transfer. Thus, the indigenous development of an automatic fingerprint identification system under the specifications drawn out with police experts was decided upon.<
