§ Mr. GibbTo ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what assessment he has made of the efficacy of computer technology in matching fingerprints. [72119]
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§ Mr. DenhamWith the introduction of the National Automated Fingerprint Identification System (NAFIS), all of the fingerprint bureaux of England and Wales now have the ability to access, store and search national databases of both "ten-prints" from arrestees and marks from scenes of crime. The ability to automate the processing of fingerprints is a huge efficiency gain for the Police Service, where previously this was an extremely labour intensive process.
While the main advantage of NAFIS is speed of search, human expertise is still required. At the forefront of fingerprint detection is the multi-disciplined team of photographers, biologists and chemists who are tasked to enhance the retrieval of fingerprint at crime scenes, and the fingerprint Officers who verify matches and make the identification of marks from scenes of crime.
Response times using NAFIS have meant that arresting officers can now definitively identify persons in custody and associate them with any previous criminal history, in under an hour. Scenes of crime mark searching have equally benefited from the introduction of NAFIS and it is possible for fingerprint bureaux to obtain the responses to searches against the entire National database in under an hour.