Police Panel Wants Quick Plan on Fingerprint Logjam

The Los Angeles Police Commission asked officials Tuesday to draw up a plan within two weeks to remedy the backlog of fingerprints from 10,000 unsolved homicides.

The commission action follows a request by the Los Angeles City Council that the department quickly reduce its backlog.

The Times reported Feb. 10 that the Los Angeles Police Department has thousands of prints that have not been checked for possible matches against a national FBI computer database. Earlier, Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca announced that after a match was made on the FBI computer, a man was arrested on suspicion of killing two El Segundo police officers 45 years ago.

LAPD Robbery Homicide Det. Dave Lambkin told the commission Tuesday that it would take hours to scan in prints from each of the unsolved homicides dating back to 1960.

A federal database that contains 44 million fingerprints was developed in 1999 by the FBI, allowing local law enforcement agencies to search for matching prints in just two hours.

The LAPD started a unit dedicated to investigating so-called cold cases more than a year ago, but efforts have been hampered by funding and staffing limitations in the department’s Scientific Investigation Division, which is struggling just to keep up with new cases.

The LAPD’s latent-print unit is staffed by about 80 people, with two employees assigned to enter cold-case prints into the federal database and 20 others to compare prints for investigators. Police officials said that they have authorization for 32 employees to enter prints into databases, but that they have 12 vacancies.