County Moves Quickly on Fund Application for Fingerprint System

In an all-out search for money, an assistant sheriff flew to Sacramento Tuesday to hand-deliver an application for state funds to let Orange County set up a $2.46-million, state-of-the-art fingerprint system of the type credited with identifying the suspected “Night Stalker.”

Assistant Sheriff Walter Fath took the application to the state Department of Justice soon after the county Board of Supervisors agreed to take part in what is envisioned as a statewide automated fingerprint identification system.

Under legislation passed earlier this year, the state will pay 70% and local government 30% of the cost of the system. But the Legislature allocated only $7 million to be split among localities.

“We’d like to be the first in the door” to apply for the money, Sheriff Brad Gates told the supervisors in urging them to approve county participation in the system.

Supervisor Thomas F. Riley said the board was in a rush to get the application in “so we can get our share of the money.”

Fee System Envisioned

Gates headed a committee that recommended to the supervisors that they purchase the equipment. The sheriff said police chiefs from a number of cities in the county said they expected to receive authorization to use the county system and to pay a fee, to be determined later, for each fingerprint processed.

Riley said what is known as the California Identification System “will allow all law enforcement in Orange County to access a local data base of criminals’ fingerprints as well as accessing the 4.5 million fingerprint cards at the California Department of Justice in Sacramento.”

He said the system could be used to identify a suspect from prints found at the scene of a crime and to confirm the identity of someone who is arrested or of a dead person whose name is unknown.

“This will also provide faster apprehension of criminals with a corresponding increase in recovered stolen property,” Riley said.

Gates’ committee said in a report that police finding a fingerprint at a crime scene now “must already know the name of a suspect” before matching the prints. He said they have a success rate of only 1%, and predicted that the new machinery will provide a rate of 18% to 20%.

Wanted Criminals Released

In addition, the committee said that in some cases wanted criminals using aliases have been released before their identities could be learned because manual comparison of fingerprints is so time-consuming.

The county now has an automated system that compares crime scene fingerprints to those on file in the county, covering 650,000 people who have applied for various licenses or who have been convicted of crimes locally.

Gates said that when police agencies were hunting for the Night Stalker, his department sent fingerprints obtained at the scene of an assault and rape in Mission Viejo to Sacramento for comparison with prints on file with the state. He said the state normally denied access to its system so it would not be overwhelmed, but because of the “magnitude” of the Night Stalker case an exception was granted.

Police said the fingerprints matched those of Richard Ramirez. The day after Gates, the Los Angeles County sheriff and the Los Angeles police chief identified Ramirez, he was captured in East Los Angeles.

Ramirez, 25, faces 14 murder charges in Los Angeles County and has been charged with attempted murder and rape in Orange County in connection with the Mission Viejo attack.

The Night Stalker spread terror throughout Southern California last summer by sneaking into darkened houses through unlocked windows and doors to attack his sleeping victims. Some were bludgeoned with hammers, some were stabbed and some were shot.

Gates said the new local system would consist of a $2-million master computer, two local terminals costing $200,000 each that can accept fingerprints and search records, and two terminals costing $30,000 each that can display fingerprints already in the system for comparison with those of people who have been arrested or whose fingerprints have been found at a crime scene.

The sheriff said the state system will cut the time required to search for a match of fingerprints from 15 days to several hours.