LAPD Wants to Tie In to Print Computer : Gates, 2 Councilmen Cite State System’s Recent Successes

Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates and two city councilmen urged Wednesday that $6 million be spent to provide the Police Department with its own fingerprint identification computer to tie in with the state system that identified Night Stalker suspect Richard Ramirez.

The state’s computer system more recently led authorities to the alleged killers of a young Thousand Oaks couple whose bodies were found near Mulholland Drive last weekend.

Gates and Councilmen Zev Yaroslavsky and Hal Bernson said in a City Hall press conference that many of the Night Stalker’s victims and the Thousand Oaks pair--Brian E. Harris, 20, and Michelle Ann Boyd, 19--may have been spared if police had the computer in operation one year ago. The computer may have targeted those suspects for previous crimes, they explained.

The three officials rejected contentions that the city would be better served joining with the county to fund a regional computer system. Gates estimated that the Los Angeles police could run about 100,000 fingerprints a year through its own system but would be able to check only 20,000 in a regional system.

“We should move very, very quickly. . . . It not only solves crimes, but it can prevent crimes,” said Yaroslavsky, who as the council’s finance committee chairman had previously balked at the $6-million price tag. “There’s enough crime for the sheriff to have his system and the city to have ours.”

Gates described the system as “clearly the biggest breakthrough since we began back in the Dark Ages to identify people through fingerprints.”

Under existing conditions, it is estimated that a technician could take 64 years conducting a “cold search” through the 1.7 million fingerprints on file with the Los Angeles Police Department. The computer system can perform the same task in less than 45 minutes, the officials said.

The statewide system, operated by the state attorney general’s office, zeroed in on Ramirez as the Night Stalker suspect in three minutes after being provided with a print found at the scene of the last murder. The power of the system was demonstrated again last weekend when a partial print taken from a rear-view mirror of Boyd’s car led to the arrest of four suspects.

Ramirez may have been apprehended much earlier through a computer search, Gates said. In June, 1984, he said, detectives lifted six fingerprints from a murder scene--but were unable to link those prints to a suspect. After Ramirez was arrested, the prints were matched to his.

If those same prints had been routinely run through a computer that June, they would have matched prints taken from Ramirez during previous arrests for lesser offenses, Gates said.

Along with day-to-day use, the computer could help crack some of the city’s 4,600 unsolved homicides dating to 1947, Gates said.

The Police Department’s budget request for the computer was blue-penciled last year as the city staff studied the possibility of a joint fingerprint program with the county--a proposal that has been backed by Mayor Tom Bradley.

The computer proposal will come before the council’s committee on police, fire and public safety, chaired by Bernson, on Oct. 18. A lease-purchase arrangement may be considered. Bernson said that $1.5 million that was recovered by police as evidence in narcotics investigations and has since reverted to police use could serve as “a down payment” on the computer.