FBI Nabs New Technology for Fingerprint ID System : Crime: Agency is automating its database to replace cumbersome system. New process locates suspects faster.

Police, clueless and frustrated over the respected professor’s slaying, come up with a single fingerprint at the murder scene. They rush it to the FBI, and within hours the killer is identified.

If this sounds too good to be true, it is--for now. It would take weeks, even months, to get the fingerprint through the FBI’s cumbersome system. And at the end of the process, the chances that a fingerprint examiner could match a single print with that of one of the 32 million individuals whose prints are on file with the FBI would be virtually nil.

But by 1998, the FBI plans to be using a computerized system that will slash the turnaround time to practically nothing: as little as two hours for a suspect in custody and 48 hours for more routine cases in which no one is being held.

All this will be possible thanks to a marriage of two technologies: laser scanners that can read fingerprints much as supermarket scanners now read bar codes, and computers that can match fingerprints far faster than the human eye. The fingerprint scanners were developed for law enforcement but are already spawning an array of applications as substitutes for such everyday items as door keys and credit cards.

Some state and city law enforcement authorities, including California and Los Angeles, already are operating their own automated fingerprint systems, and there the FBI will be just catching up.

But nationally, the so-called integrated automated fingerprint identification system, projected to cost $520 million, will be an enormous advance.

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If the automated system had been operating when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in 1968, for example, assassin James Earl Ray could have been identified within hours from a thumbprint on the rifle, binoculars and a map that he left behind, FBI officials calculate.

As it was, the FBI identified Ray 15 days after the killing by running a print from the crime scene against a file of fugitives’ prints. During those 15 days, investigators looked fruitlessly for the killer under two aliases across the country while riots scarred many of the nation’s cities.

Already the FBI has in place a computerized repository of the names and fingerprints of more than 20 million individuals, from arrested persons to convicted felons. Some 200 employees work full time to transfer the millions of remaining 10-print cards--augmented by 20,000 to 30,000 cards that roll in every day from law enforcement agencies across the country--onto computer tape at FBI headquarters in Washington.

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Some law enforcement agencies and members of Congress have criticized the FBI’s pace of automation as too slow.

“The FBI is playing catch-up to an extent,” said Wally Briefs, the identification unit coordinator at the Sunnyvale (Calif.) Department of Public Safety. “There are systems all over the United States that are ahead of the FBI.”

But as soon as next year, the FBI’s system is scheduled to allow police anywhere in the country to tap into a central data bank of the fingerprints of 300,000 to 400,000 wanted persons.

Using computers in their patrol cars, police will be able to run a suspect’s right index fingerprint against the FBI’s file of fugitives’ prints. A match will provide sufficient legal cause to take the suspect to the station for a 10-finger check. The cost to equip each patrol car with the equipment will be about $500.

Even this is only a small step along the way to the far more sophisticated system that the FBI intends to have in place by 1998.

That system, using all 10 fingerprints instead of just one, will provide law enforcement authorities with positive identifications in as little as two hours. Still more important in some situations, it will enable computerized matches of “latent” fingerprints--those left behind at the scene of a crime--with prints on file at the FBI.

The new fingerprint system constitutes the largest single technology investment the FBI ever made.

The FBI’s fingerprint activity is split about equally between criminal and civil applications, with the civil ranging from applicants for federal jobs to licensing required for certain industries and child-care providers in some states.

The FBI’s identification division has blossomed into the Criminal Justice Information Services, which is in the process of relocating to West Virginia.

“This division is the single largest in the FBI, and it overwhelmingly serves the criminal justice community outside the FBI,” said assistant FBI Director Steven Pomerantz, who is in charge of the CJIS.

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Even when the automated system begins operating, there will be a substantial number of police departments that lack the technology to fully use it. “We’ll still be taking fingerprint cards from them and entering them in the system,” Pomerantz said. “For a number of years, we’ll work a dual system.”

The new system will be entirely paperless, with images of each finger recorded and entered into a computerized database and transmitted electronically to the FBI. No human has to touch a fingerprint card in the process, but a certified fingerprint examiner must still certify each match.

The system will be able to handle 635 latent print searches a day, split about evenly between federal investigators and state and local police. This will limit its use to homicides and sex crimes.

“The problem is that in a crime of violence, it’s not unusual to develop 25 to 30 latent prints,” noted Danny W. Greathouse, chief of the FBI’s latent fingerprint section.

“Six hundred and thirty-five is a significant number, but it is not many when you think of how many murders or rapes or armed robberies there are every day.”

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California’s entire daily allocation would be just 34 latent searches. “If you have a triple murder in Los Angeles, that could take up all the 34 searches,” Greathouse said. “Then you put on hold that double murder in Sacramento and that rape in San Francisco.”

But thanks to systems already in place at the state level and in Los Angeles, California enjoys a substantial head start and will need to use the national system only sparingly.

The Los Angeles Police Department ran 10,000 latent prints through its system in 1993 and, as a result, identified 2,670 people, said Wendell Clements, chief of the latent fingerprint section. Prints of everyone arrested for a violent crime are run against the department’s database of latent prints from unsolved crimes.

About 95% of the matches are with the local databases, not the state’s or the FBI’s, Clements noted--a reflection of criminals’ habit of sticking close to home.

“I can’t think of the last time I had a burglar fly up from L.A., rent a car and drive to Sunnyvale to steal a microwave oven,” said Briefs, the official in Sunnyvale, which was involved in a pilot program for an advanced automated fingerprint identification system. “The vast majority of criminals stay local.”

Latent prints are usually far less distinct than inked prints taken at a police station, and they typically carry only a tiny fraction of the details that examiners need to match them against prints on file. Experts worry that computers will have an even harder time dealing with latent prints than humans do.

After substantial controversy within law enforcement circles, the FBI settled on a system that will provide a medium level of clarity--better than many metropolitan police departments have in their automated fingerprint systems but less than the nation’s top fingerprint sleuths wanted.

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As significant as these developments appear, it took some fancy budget footwork by the master of Capitol Hill manipulation, Sen. Robert C. Byrd (Va.), to win congressional approval of the funding. One year he resorted to a “dire emergency supplemental appropriations bill” to raise $185 million of the project’s $520 million cost.

Pomerantz, assistant director of CJIS, acknowledged that fingerprint processing “is not one of the big, glamorous items in law enforcement. So money is tough to get.”

The move to West Virginia, with two satellite facilities already operating there, may be a boon for Byrd’s constituents, but it is proving a major headache for FBI Director Louis J. Freeh. Freeh has been unable to deliver on a promise made by predecessor William S. Sessions that no jobs would be lost during the move.

Only 418 of 1,718 division employees still in Washington are willing to move to West Virginia, and finding FBI jobs in Washington for the other 1,300 is proving impossible at a time when the entire federal bureaucracy is shrinking.

The division’s staff is largely black and female, and Freeh has ordered that those who won’t move be given preferences for openings in FBI jobs here and elsewhere. He is notifying employees six months in advance that their jobs are being transferred and guaranteeing them that they can keep working until Sept. 30, 1996.