SCIENCE/TECHNOLOGY : Anaheim Company Plans to Market High-Tech Look for Police Lineups

The police station lineup is a familiar scene: Six male suspects stand blinking in a glaring light. A female witness to the crime carefully inspects each of them. Her eyes finally come to rest on a man with a twitch in one eye. “It’s him!” she whispers to the detective. “He’s the one I saw!”

An Anaheim company hopes to bring a bit of the high-tech age to the police lineup. De La Rue Printrak has developed a computerized “mug-shot storage and retrieval system” that it plans to market to law enforcement agencies worldwide.

De La Rue’s Phototrak system works like this: When a suspect is booked, a photograph is taken with a video camera. The image is stored in a computer along with a description of the crime and physical information, such as age, race and sex.

De La Rue says its system is much faster than the usual police station procedure, in which suspects’ photos are taken with a 35-millimeter or instant-processing camera, then stored in a file cabinet.

“The paper file takes up a lot of physical space, and it’s time-consuming for someone to manually file,” says Lionel Grove, Phototrak product manager. “The witness has to go through the photo book page by page until he can identify someone.”

With Phototrak, he says, investigators can pull up the information “almost instantly.” A detective can narrow the search by keying in a physical description provided by witnesses, the type of crime or the modus operandi.

The same Phototrak pictures can be used for an electronic lineup. Using a video monitor, a witness can view from one to six suspects at a time. The basic system can store and retrieve 60,000 photographic images, and it can be expanded to handle 210,000 images, the company said.

At least four other companies already market electronic mug-shot systems, but “we feel we do it better,” Grove says. De La Rue is the first company to offer an optical disk storage system with its product, he says.

De La Rue, which employs 325 people in Anaheim, markets automated fingerprint identification systems to law enforcement agencies.