Computer Link Aids S.D. Police in Fingerprint Checks

San Diego law enforcement officers have taken a big step toward fingering more crime suspects.

The Police Department now has a computer tie-in to the electronic fingerprint bank in the state capital that has on file the prints of nearly a million people who have been charged with committing serious crimes. A board of seven county and city officials will decide how law enforcement agencies throughout the county will share the equipment.

The temporary computer link--the city will get a permanent setup later--streamlines identification of suspects who use aliases and will allow police to match fingerprints from the scene of a crime with those on file in Sacramento. The Sacramento data base, called Cal-ID, stores fingerprints for 900,000 people who have been charged with the more-serious misdemeanors or with felonies in California.

“Life is going to be a lot uglier for criminals in San Diego,” said John Van de Kamp, California’s attorney general, at a news conference outside city police headquarters Monday. “When the entire system is complete, we expect Cal-ID to help capture more than 1,000 criminals a year in San Diego County alone--murderers, rapists and burglars and others responsible for over 3,000 crimes--that would otherwise go undetected.”

Police Chief Bill Kolender called the system revolutionary.

“It will put law enforcement in the business of solving cases through prints, instead of just confirming suspects after an arrest is made,” he said.

Officials previously had to encode fingerprints manually, classifying them into groups by whorl type and ridge count, and matching them by hand. Cal-ID, which stores fingerprint images, was first used in a test case last summer to identify Richard Ramirez, the “Night Stalker” suspect in a string of slayings in Southern California.

Since then, local agencies have mailed fingerprints to Sacramento to be checked, resulting in 11 arrests in San Diego alone. State officials could check about 30 prints a day by hand, and 2,500 a day by mail and Cal-ID. Now San Diego police can check hundreds of prints a day.

Besides checking fingerprints, the system will be used to expose those using aliases. “It makes it virtually impossible to deceive law enforcement with an alias,” said Tony Doonan, Cal-ID manager.

San Diego was chosen for the pilot project because of cooperation between the police and the sheriff departments, officials said. Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside counties are acquiring permanent terminals, according to Gary Cooper, program manager of criminal identification for the California Department of Justice.

The San Diego terminal, made up of 10 pieces of equipment that take up an entire room, is on loan for a year from the state Justice Department. San Diego will get its own terminal, as well as one that searches only local entries and less-serious misdemeanors, by the summer of 1987.

The permanent system will cost $21 million, with the state paying 70%. It will have access to 5 million sets of prints by mid-1987.