The State : 1,207 Suspects Identified

More than 1,200 suspects were found by the state’s fingerprint identification computer in its first year of operation. Atty. Gen. John Van de Kamp told a Sacramento news conference that since October, 1985, the computer conducted 11,695 searches in 9,211 cases submitted by more than 250 law enforcement agencies. In those searches, 1,207 suspects were identified in 1,055 cases. Some cases went back 13 years, and 90 of them involved murder, he said. Van de Kamp said the system links the state’s computer with terminals in law enforcement agencies in Los Angeles, Orange, San Francisco, Ventura, Kern and San Diego counties. Five other counties will join soon, he said. “Once the system is (fully) functioning, it will cut out the middleman here in Sacramento on tens of thousands of cases every year,” he said. “Our best estimate is that the system will identify up to 13,500 murderers, rapists and other criminals responsible for an estimated 40,000 crimes annually.”